Trick of the Light
by Tilts At Windmills
Summary: The paths of enemies cross from time to time. Anne Boleyn/Thomas Cromwell.
1. Blooded

**DISCLAIMER:** **I am a poor student who would have to pay you in tins of baked beans if you decided to sue me. Showtime should know that I'll put the pretty actors back when I've finished playing with them, and any semblance of real history belongs to itself.**

**Takes place towards the end of Season 2, beginning somewhere in-between Katherine of Aragon's death and Anne's 'edge of a golden world'. I try to stick as close to in-show canon as possible, but a few digressions and alterations have been necessary for my own wicked purposes.**

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_Trick of the Light_

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1.

"Wait." Her voice is imperious, a command, just as she meant it to be.

He hesitates, already half-inclined into a departing bow, and she sees the guarded look of trepidation as he stills, straightening slowly, his gaze returning to her own. She has a brief impression of his uncertainty, and allows herself to smile at this power, this fear that she wields carelessly now, gifted to her beneath the weight of a crown and the illusion of a promise. That much Henry has given her, if nothing else, and she grasps it still, her fragile right, fierce in her possessiveness for the very fact of its fragility.

"Madam?" His voice is politely enquiring, impeccably neutral, but she knows his tricks by now, this master of diversion and deception, nimble on his feet, side-stepping, eluding, elegantly cunning, turning conversations back on themselves with a quirked eyebrow or a half-smile. She knows the impersonal tone is part of the façade, poised deliberately to unhand her, deflect the knife-point of her enquiry. Behind the calm darkness of his eyes, the viper is poised.

Anne snaps the prayer-book shut as she turns towards him again, hoping he might flinch. But Cromwell is standing with his hands clasped behind him and one shoulder dipped forward slightly, the edges of his mouth down-turned and a tiny frown puckering the skin between his dark brows, an attitude of pained, polite sufferance as he endures her caprices, the whims of the whore-queen. She feels an inexplicable rise of irritation as she looks at him now; how she hates that expression of prim, staunched impassivity, that almost contemptuously tolerant silence of his that bears down between them. She would, she realises, feeling only a small murmur of surprise, very much like to strike him, shatter that duplicitous mask he cultivates and replace it with naked alarm.

_Give me a reason_, she thinks.

"I was wondering if you knew of the King's plans for Edgewood Abbey." She makes her voice deliberately casual, knowing he will easily discern the threat.

He has the audacity to smile slightly, almost a moue of dismissal, and Anne feels her own mouth tighten in cold fury. The wretched man doesn't know how close he is to the back of her hand.

"I know that His Majesty plans to put it to better uses than it was wont. It was previously the site of the most appalling licentiousness and debauchery, God pardon, but now that it is out of the hands of the monks, it might finally be of service to a deserving cause."

Anne smirks away a sting of irritation at the ease of his dissemblance, the attempt to mislead. His tone is grave and faintly lecturing, and as he speaks he has crossed the room in a contemplative arc, both widening the space between them and forcing her to turn her head slightly to keep him in her sight. He is now beyond the range of her hand, and it makes her want to cuff him all the more.

"His Majesty plans to sell it to Sir Francis Wareham - for a considerable sum, I hear." She is still only mildly caustic, but she wants him to know that she has him in check.

A flicker of a grimace passes across his brow, as though her obtuseness is almost too much to bear.

"Madam, it is prudent…indeed, essential, that such buildings are disposed of in a manner that proves profitable to the realm. Besides - " He gestures lightly, a careless half-shrug - "I believe His Majesty trusts to the discretion of Sir Francis."

"I should think you do believe that, Mr Cromwell, considering it was your idea."

His lips part as he absorbs the explicit nature of the riposte, shoulders moving in the slow deliberation of an inward breath. His long silence is familiar to her, habitual in him, borne out of wilful arrogance, perhaps, or allowing time for the swift contrivances of his mind as he unwinds the particulars of his opponent's argument and re-sews them in graceful knots, tripping the unwary with the unforeseen double-edge of their own words. She will not allow for it this time; she has out-foxed greater than this blacksmith's boy.

"Do you presume to deny it?" she demands, flinging the prayer-book down onto her bureau as she takes a step towards him, closing the gap he has created between them with each word. "Is it really your intention to attempt to mislead your betters, so brazenly, so utterly without shame?"

She is inches from him now, close enough for her breath to mingle with his, but he doesn't try to evade her, instead bearing the onslaught with an expression of resigned martyrdom, blinking a little as her enunciation sharpens.

"It was never my _intention_, madam - " he begins, but she cuts across him triumphantly, seizing on the inflection.

"But you do not deny that you have misled the King?"

At last she knows she has touched him. He meets her eyes in barely disguised shock. His pupils are inky with dilation, and she discerns the flat mirror of her own reflection swimming on their surfaces.

"I pray you pardon my boldness, Majesty, but you are quite mistaken." She notes the duplicitous change in address, the sly appeal to her vanity. Unwittingly, she finds herself rising to it, lifting her chin with a half-toss of her head, her mouth pinching with furious, luxuriating pride.

"You may think that I am too bound by the limits of my duty to hold any sway over His Majesty's will," she says, and as she speaks his closes his eyes, an almost apologetic grimace cinching the delicate skin at their edges. Why does he not look at her? Can she not expect him to answer to that much, at least? "But I assure you, Mr Cromwell," (a day will come when she will have held that vile name in her mouth for the last time) "that I see the false face of your deceit. Perhaps the King is not so wise as he would have us believe, to be influenced by a counsel so plainly wicked."

She feels a wild thrill as she utters the accusation, scything across her anger and leaving her skin prickling in breathless triumph in its wake. Her hand twitches at her side, reflexively, as the temptation once again ebbs into her mind. She _wants _to hurt him…and more, she wants him to fear her, to glorify her in dread, to mortify himself for the sake of her… Is that not the prerogative of a queen, after all?

Her gaze is level with his mouth, and she is distracted by the sensitive curve of his upper lip; she is deliberate in her overt consideration of it, mentally taking possession of him, her subject, claiming him in the long indulgence of her gaze. The soft bow of his upper lip creates a thoughtful pressure against his lower, drawing the habitual creases at the edges of his mouth into an almost melancholy down-turn. It is a proud mouth, at times nervously flexible, and it somehow betrays him more than his eyes, which would be all but unfathomable if it were not for the delicate lines fanning from their corners that puzzle Anne with their testament to a smile she has rarely seen. This close, she can detect the work of an errant razorblade, a small nick along the definition of his jaw line that has bled well as small cuts tend to do, has been blotted away but bled anew, rose smudged against the grain of his fastidiously clean shave. It strikes her as a peculiar chink in his defences, almost as though she has never considered his ability to bleed, and the realisation marks her. It is a small, inexplicable victory.

The Chancellor's nostrils flare in a barely audible inhalation, and Anne realises that he has been holding his breath.

When he finally speaks, his voice is roughened, halting as he attempts to regain himself: "I regret that I have seemingly forfeited Your Majesty's trust..."

"No." She shakes her head, just slightly, and his eyes move to her face in silent questioning. "Nothing is forfeit that never existed in the first place, Mr Cromwell." It is as warm as any assurance might be.

He makes a small, startled movement when she raises her hand, but her fingers brace gently against the angle of his jaw, turning his face to the side as her lids lower speculatively. Her thumb finds the blade-cut and traces over it, feeling the small scratch where the blood has dried against the soft pad of her thumb-tip. He is standing perfectly still, submitting to the cool familiarity of her perusal of him as though transfixed by it, but he watches her face cautiously, prey beneath the eyes of a cat.

"You ought to be more careful," she says softly, a deliberate echo of her own words from another time.

She will hunt out this cuckoo in her nest.

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**Next time: 'If it was still within her grasp to see it to fruition it would not be only Cromwell's head on a spike that she would order; no, she fancies a veritable flock of harvested crowns roosting along the battlements of Tower Bridge.'**


	2. Of Good Portent

**A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews, guys! I always really appreciate any comments I get :)**

2.

She devours the hard, knobbly apples plucked too early from the orchard because the bitterness suits her mood. A boy-child seems unlikely as things stand, for the King has become an infrequent visitor to her bed, but Anne has come to depend on tokens of superstition more than the physicians who ply her with herbs and spices of varyingly foul taste and religiously inspect the colour of her urine. Yet even the stars seem reluctant to divine good fortune of late; the astrologer royal has inspected her chart and proclaimed the future's secrets to be obscured by Mercury on the ascent.

In fact, Henry's attitude towards her of late is meticulously tolerant. It is nothing that he makes overt, but it's rather like he bears her presence at the moment, awaiting the time when she will become useful again. Anne is covetous of the thought, and she attempts to lure him with promises of her love. It was never so hard as this in the past, when the merest glance would set him aflame and his hands would be everywhere before they had even attained the decency of solitude. She knows her monthly bleeding is a regular disappointment to both of them, but she endures its pain more than he, the cramps that make her bite her lip and writhe in her bed every morning, fists pressing into the empty, voiding chasm of her belly, weighing on her like a pall of atonement. It is her punishment for that which she cannot bring forth.

When she feels well again (or, if not well, then at least steadier, able to walk more than a yard without the need to double over in sickness and agony), she ventures out of the gloomy solitude and still half-mourning dourness of her apartments and into the hall for the evening's entertainment. Mark has a new capriccio from Italy, some spirited affair as he promises her, and as her ladies assemble speculatively around her at the table he beams across the room at her before he begins to play, so blissfully untroubled by the world around him that for a moment Anne cannot smile back for the grasp of longing that seizes her. It is not as though she asks for much, not now anyway. She aches only to be fecund, to be given what the Almighty in His infinite wisdom sees fit to deny her.

Still. She finds a smile, somehow, as she always does, and makes everyone believe it. It is still within her power to glitter more brilliantly than any other woman in the room.

She hasn't seen Henry. She looks around for him, stretching a little where she sits to crane to her right towards the entrance to the presence chamber. Courtiers whose faces she recognises but whose names she does not care to remember are jockeying for position near the door, each hoping for their moment with the King. Only a few of them will succeed, perhaps none at all this evening. But they will linger for as long as hope remains that His Majesty will look favourably upon them, as long as the absence of any real confirmation of denial allows them to continue in their aspiration upward.

She wants wine. The dregs in her goblet are pungent with tannin, and she plans her complaint to the royal brewery. She has downed it because she craves the warmth in the pit of her belly, the hit of vertigo to her bloodstream, and so she swallows the taste without even a grimace, though it stays in her mouth long after the dizziness has faded.

If it were possible, her mood only sours at the sight of the Lord Chancellor. He is winding his way with deft unobtrusiveness through the assembled glitterati, politely responding to those who make obeisances to him with a small smile and a tilt of his own head. Coming level with the high table, he pauses briefly to acknowledge her, the obsequious formality of the gesture merely an abasement to ritual. She searches for disingenuousness in his expression, and tries to tell herself that she sees it. The tannin is still on her lips as she follows his movements across the room, towards where her father and brother stand together near the door to the presence chamber. He stops to speak briefly to them but does not linger; with another elegant genuflection, he passes beyond them, into the inner sanctum from whose mysteries and plottings and untold plans Anne is now utterly excluded.

Is Henry in there? She feels a sudden wild compulsion to go storming in, heedless of the guards, breaking through into these men's little pact of secrecy, Cromwell and Suffolk, and that Seymour harlot's brother too, closeting around the King and dripping lies into his ear day by day like crows pecking at the festering wound of a downed giant. If it was still within her grasp to see it to fruition it would not be only Cromwell's head on a spike that she would order; no, she fancies a veritable flock of harvested crowns roosting along the battlements of Tower Bridge. It is an image so macabre, so extravagantly absurd in its ghoulishness, that before she even realises it Anne laughs, a hard, brittle sound that is undoubtedly louder than is at all natural. Nearby faces turn towards her nervously, and Mark reels lightly in an almost-pirouette to seek her out as he continues to play, the lively, fluttering voice of the fiddle rising and falling upon the discordant roar of conversation, his large eyes lit with a slight enquiry, his smile only a little less certain. Anne presses her fingers against her lips as her mouth still twists in unwilling mirth, trying to force the hard, empty giggles back down.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Cromwell leaving the presence chamber. She can't quite put her finger on what it is, but there is something strange about his movements; he appears almost…flustered, and there is a look about him of someone who has recently been subject to some sudden, violent turmoil, his gestures characterised by the feverish animation of a dog that knows it has narrowly evaded its master's boot. There is nothing obviously out of place about him, and yet Anne has the strong impression of some indistinct dishevelment, as though his collar should be askew, or his hair in a disarray, though he appears to all intents and purposes as faultlessly groomed as he looked when he went in. There is, however, a slight flush across his cheekbones, and in his haste to cross the hall he doesn't notice Sir Henry Norris's frantic attempts to get his attention. Sir Henry clumsily pursues the Chancellor, who seems to possess a preternatural ability to negotiate recalcitrant courtiers while Sir Henry's own route is thwarted at every turn, almost leaping over one old man who unknowingly shambles into his path, before he eventually manages to intercede Cromwell's exit by the door by practically throwing himself in his way. Sir Henry whisks his cap off breathlessly, but Anne sees the irritation in Cromwell's face. As Sir Henry talks, Cromwell's dark eyes flit continually back to the door of the presence chamber.

She does not expect him to look at her, and when he does Anne glances away guiltily before she can stop herself, feeling as though she has been caught in some indecency. Within the second of coming to herself again, she looks back proudly, deliberately, defiantly staring him down unblinking until he makes a small, hesitant movement, almost a shake of his head, and looks away. His expression is so curiously blank and unrecognising that for a moment Anne wonders if he did indeed see her after all, or was simply glancing around the room in an attempt at finding a reason to extricate himself from Sir Henry. But when Sir Henry finally bobs in gratitude and Cromwell gives a curt nod, turning to leave, his eyes find her once again, past the ebullient figure of Mark and over the heads of the courtiers, and in them Anne thinks that she sees the suggestion of a smile - dark, calculating…victorious.

Later, she devours the hard flesh of an apple taken too soon, its bitter yield of juice drawing a shiver from her. Perhaps there is a little of the witch in her after all, she thinks, smiling at the beautiful irony of it, because the strange magic of half-superstition and overwhelming want have conspired, and by the month's end she knows that her courses have stopped.

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**Next time: 'Even when unmentioned she remains the qualification behind everything, the condition upon which her family's aspirations and betterment entirely hang.'**


	3. Magnanimity

**A/N: I've messed a little with the canon timeline in this chapter, re: Anne's last pregnancy, Katherine's death and Henry's correspondence with the Holy Roman Emperor. Considering Anne's only just become pregnant in this story, I've compressed these events particularly with regards to Emperor Charles's victory over the Turks and Henry's attempt at an alliance with him. I know it's not really important, but I just mention it because it could be annoying if it proves noticeable :)**

**Huge thanks to anyone who reads/reviews :)**

3.

It takes days for the bruise on his arm to fade. It is the pressure of a full hand gripping his flesh, the finger marks distinct in their slight redness amidst the deeper violet that radiates outward from them, the thumb an alternating, darker mark on the underside of his arm where the King's grip has closed firmly upon him. He sees the bruise only twice a day, once in the pallid early morning light as he washes and dresses, firmly straightening his cuffs in the security that there are layers upon layers of cotton, silk, velvet between his skin and the outside world to conceal the sight from intrusive eyes; and once by the guttering of a solitary candle at night (or, more often than not, very early morning again) when he disrobes for bed, pulling at the lace of his high collar so that it sags open and exposes his neck, the contour of his shoulder, then the mottled handprint, approximately three inches above his elbow and already yellowing at the edges. He watches its progress with detachment; it is not so serious as to cause him any genuine discomfort, though his arm aches for a day or two afterwards from where it has been wrenched. He can write well enough with his left hand, though it does make his wrist hurt and the paperwork is never as crisp as he likes it to be. He finds himself crossing his own name out in irritation, dissatisfied with the spiked loop of the two interlacing Ls.

When he next sees the King, they both take care to not mention the incident. He actually suspects His Majesty has allowed it to slip his mind. And if he flinches slightly when the King makes an unexpected gesture, a sudden descriptive arc that encompasses his enthusiasm for the extravagant order of jewels to be cut for Mistress Seymour, then he regains himself in an instant and is calm, unruffled, steady when he replies as ever, "Yes, Your Majesty." The King smiles at him, inexplicably pleased. He is childlike in these moments, when planning for a future that ever changes with his whims, costing everything but his own desire, confined by nothing but the limits which he alone may impose. Cromwell keeps his reservations to himself. It is now no longer a question of whether the Seymour girl will be queen, but when, and His Majesty is more alive with prospective change than Cromwell has seen him in months. He has set his mark to a maid more humble in her stock than the present Queen ever was, and her narrow, insignificant little life is about to change forever. Cromwell is not so naive as to suspect her of being without guile; he has spoken to Sir John and his eldest son only briefly, but he has seen the hunger in their eyes, the hunted, hunting alertness that ravenously tracks the fortunes of this, their flaxen, limpid marriage-prize, whose own prospects of love are fading along with the bloom of her adolescence. Cromwell is not familiar with the custom of being beholden to the career of one's own daughter for survival, certainly not to the extent that one must set them in the path of the devil in order to facilitate their rise, but it is a game he sees played with depressing regularity at court. Above all, purity is the token to be brokered on, regardless of its actual existence. For the King, it is the very promise of the lady's innocence that keeps him fervent at her heels, and he, at least, seems to believe it. Cromwell supposes that this is the most important thing. Yet there is a curious, unsettling mania to his movements at times, and he is quick to anger as Cromwell knows. He tells himself that what happened between them was a regrettable instance that he himself must entirely shoulder the blame for; the King is yet to raise a hand to him, and Cromwell is certain that day will never come. He will not give His Majesty reason, and while at times he finds himself doubting…if not the King's wisdom then perhaps his manner of enforcing it (though this is of course treason and he will not suffer to entertain the thought), he never considers his sovereign's actions to be anything other than just. He can afford to believe nothing else.

His arm is all but healed when he sees the King again for the second time. He is a little surprised to be offered ale.

"Majesty?" he questions delicately, cautiously smiling because the King is smiling, and that can mean praise as easily as a reprimand, or anything in-between.

"We have reason to celebrate, Mr Cromwell," Henry says, his azure-ice eyes ablaze with the passionate intensity that can only mean that a plan long in the gestation is close to fruition. The King is not a patient man, and Cromwell knows that it tries him most grievously to be forced to wait upon expectation, to delay the fulfilment of desire once he has set his heart on it. But something as sensitive as the present matter in hand must be approached with the utmost discretion; Cromwell has counselled his king on this often enough, to his own cost, but Henry has always known the value of proceeding with caution, despite its frustrations.

"All things move apace, it seems," he says now, crossing with his lithe, tense grace from Cromwell's side to his chair by the fireplace; he seems about to sit down, but instead places his hand along its back, regarding Cromwell from across the room. "I hear from Chapuys that Emperor Charles is willing to discuss terms. It seems since his victory over the Turks his mood has become somewhat more…amenable." He pauses, eyeing Cromwell over the rim of his goblet, his gaze mischievous. "Extraordinary what miracles a man's emboldened vanity may work."

Cromwell smiles at what is indeed a very decisive irony. Clearly the Emperor possesses a shorter memory than is characteristic of monarchs, for the death of the Dowager Princess Katherine has undoubtedly eased the way towards an alliance. Either that, or loyalty only lives with the beat of a heart. But both he and the King know better than to trust to the word of the Pope's lapdog. For all his apparent bonhomie, he is equally as free to turn his troops towards England now that he has the Turkish victory behind him.

"Of course," Henry is going on, thin fingers lightly skimming the carven back of the chair, "it is not enough to trust merely to his word. I have already instructed Chapuys to send my commendations to the Emperor, but we must work on cementing an alliance without delay. It would be…most expedient if the Emperor were willing to intercede with the Pope on our behalf."

Cromwell nods once, slowly. "Yes, Your Majesty." He is still tentatively fingering the stem of his own goblet, the ale untouched.

"But that is not our only reason, Mr Cromwell," Henry says now, moving from behind the chair to the table where the gleaming silver decanter rests. Cromwell watches him silently as he refills his goblet, turning to offer the Chancellor more ale as well and smiling knowingly when Cromwell declines. He returns the decanter to the table, and continues blithely:

"It has been my desire that the Seymour family should be installed at court. Sir John has already proved himself to be a valuable asset to the Council, and I have high hopes for his son, Edward. The elder, I believe. "

Cromwell notes the careful absence of the daughter from the praise. Even when unmentioned she remains the qualification behind everything, the condition upon which her family's aspirations and betterment entirely hang. Sir John is keenly aware of this, and while he has so far resisted serving her up plucked and basted for His Majesty's perusal, the haste with which he has permitted the lady's courtship has been…perhaps…a little indecent. Prospective brood mares are not always paraded so flagrantly by their sires.

"Sir John has been most gracious in accepting the offer," the King says, and takes a sip of ale. Sir John, of course, will have had little choice in the matter, even if he has possessed reservations about exchanging Wulfhall for Westminster. One tends to find that once one steps over the threshold of the palace, it is a small impossibility to return. Intact, at least.

"I want you to make arrangements for private rooms to be prepared for them." Henry pauses thoughtfully, before his hand moves in a careless gesture as though plucking the suggestion from thin air. As though he has not already decided upon all of this. "I believe my lord Richmond is no longer in need of his apartments. They will more than suffice."

Cromwell smiles a little at the acerbity. It is the Earl of Richmond's pleasure to call the Tower home for the foreseeable future, and the King is never wasteful of the by-products of treason.

"Yes, Your Majesty," he says again, and Henry's eyes meet his, their smiles mingling like conspirators. For a moment, the King holds his gaze searchingly, piercing Cromwell with the stare that prosecutes all it sees, and just as Cromwell is beginning to feel the first stirrings of disquiet, Henry's smile sharpens anew and he gestures at Cromwell's still untasted ale.

"You will not drink, Mr Cromwell?" he says, lifting his own goblet. "Not even to toast to what the future promises us?"

Cromwell chuckles, inexplicably relieved. "Of course, Majesty," he says, stepping forward to meet the King's poised glass with his own, the crystal touching with a soft, frosted _chink_.

The ale is still cool, and it tastes of pungent honey, and baking ryegrass, and sun-heat rising from cracked Italian flagstones, and Cromwell can only swallow a little of it. But the King downs a mouthful, an almost unseemly sensuousness in the extravagance of the gesture.

"Above all, Mr Cromwell," he says once he has licked the remnants from his lips, tilting his glass so that the crystal casts a refracted light across the wall, blade-keen, "I greatly relish the prospect of change."

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**A/N: The the last line of this chapter is a deliberate misquote from Henry's letter in Season 2 Episode 10. **

**Wulfhall (or Wolfhall/Wolf Hall) was the family seat of the Seymours in Wiltshire.**

**Next time: '"Do you not have _everything _that you wanted? What else is there, Anne?"'**


	4. Sleight of Hand

**A/N: A big ol' warning (and apologies) for melodrama/angst/emoting in this chapter. Thanks so much to everyone who reads/reviews; I totally appreciate it and it makes me v. v. happy :D**

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4.

"George," Anne says, and draws him swiftly with her into the passageway.

He laughs a little as he allows himself to be tugged after her, the gesture so reminiscent of her determined scheming when they were children, spiriting him along into secrets and the conspiracies of imagined kingdoms of which she was ever queen, and he by turns king, or knight, or fool. Now he hastens to keep up with her, downward into the plot of this Queen of England and no longer Fantasia.

She has the same expression of determined focus, the same wicked glance over her shoulder at him as they flee down the warren of hallways together, into darkness, velvet curtains, painted walls, fleet-footed as deer with the hounds at their heels.

Their sanctuary is the Queen's apartments, Anne's bower now instead of the cloven tree in the nape of Hever's gardens.

In the midst of the room, set to attract the eye but anonymous beneath the concealing shroud of a drape, stands an easel. There is something strangely eerie in its isolation, the faceless canvas staring back at them from across the room as though it has been waiting for them to arrive.

George makes a show of playful resistance as his sister tugs him into position, just where the sunlight crosshatches the floor as though he is to witness some spectacle and must be angled just so, and then flits from his side. He watches her movements, smiling, bewitched by the febrile emotion he can sense in her, something that is excitement tinged with urgency, a light in her eyes that is as hungry and searching as it is faintly triumphant. He has always been helplessly enchanted by her enthusiasms and schemes, sucked in by the mercurial temper that wins favours as easily as it costs love. She seems a little dissatisfied by the privacy offered by the room, as she strides to the curtain that partitions it from the adjoining inner chamber and pulls it to one side, letting it fall back into place once she has assured herself of no lurking eavesdroppers. Her gaze is keen-edged, more mischievous than ever, when she turns back to face him again, her hands hanging at her sides, her breast visibly stirring with each breath. He knows what that expression means: some glinting, half-fiendish victory has been scored of late. The silence beats out, and Anne's smile grows positively nefarious as she poises herself at the wing of the canvas.

"_Anne_," George says at last, prompting her, feeling a familiar frustration with her wilful antagonising of him. Always, always she dances on ahead, effortless, the eye of her own storm, leaving him to only grasp at the hope of understanding in her wake.

Her lip quirks in amusement. She enjoys his dismayed annoyance with her.

"Hold your courage, brother," she says, her hand lifting like a signal to fire, grasping the edge of the drape that hangs over the canvas. "I have a spectacle with which to dazzle you."

With a small, glittering smile redolent of delicious secrets and illicit plans, she draws away the drape, stripping the canvas bare. George starts, and gulps, and stares.

It is, without a doubt, one of the finest pieces of erotica he has ever laid his eyes upon.

A fair woman reclines on a fresco bed, bare as a lamb chop. Her legs sag akimbo at the knee, exposing her fruit for the attentions of a man who crouches below her, his mouth poised to tend to her openness and drink her in. His head is inclined in ministration, his mouth a parting receptacle. She has an expression of cool detachment on her face, observing her pleasure from afar, or perhaps bestowing the privilege of her favour. Her hand rests proprietarily upon his head, reciprocating the pleasure, for it is the lady's honour to bestow upon he who attends her.

George becomes aware that Anne has moved to his side, her own head turned to take in the expansion of the canvas. Her smile is lingering almost fondly, as though it is a memory of her own that she has immortalized in paint. Perhaps, George thinks with a start, it is. He feels himself beginning to flush, utterly unprepared that possibility about this woman, his sister, never so strange to him than when she confides only half-truths, leaving him to guess at the rest, at her intentions and her motives.

"Master Holbein has hidden talents, it would appear," Anne says. "Though it took some gentle persuasion before he was willing to expose them to the light." Her voice is mischievous, lilting with deliberate innuendo, and for a moment George almost thinks that he is being invited into the conspiracy, that this is all some marvellous and elaborate game that she will reveal to him, at last.

He isn't sure what he is supposed to say. In hindsight, he reflects, it is probably not this:

"I didn't think Master Holbein painted whores."

She laughs reproachfully, forgiving of his slowness. George feels a small twinge of irritation at how ready she is to dismiss him as misunderstanding; whatever game this is, it is not one whose rules she is prepared to disclose without first teasing him into revealing his own ineptitude at playing along. It is always this way.

"It is a _gift_, George," Anne says, her half-feigned exasperation with him clipping each word even as she smiles and tilts her head, regarding him from the feline slant of her eyes. "A gift for His Majesty." She addresses the painting again, the warmth in her cheeks portentous of some self-made victory, some anticipated pleasure that she almost visibly luxuriates in as she continues. "One worthy of kings, do you not agree?"

George shifts uncomfortably where he stands, unsure what opinion of such things he is supposed to venture. The painting is striking indeed, testament to how Holbein's skills take flight once he is released from the stiff confines of portraiture, and yet George is unwilling…perhaps unable to view it with the hunger that it is no doubt designed to evoke. Perhaps when Anne smiles as she looks at it, it is because she feels the touch from memory of the lover's mouth, because in this she may find an accord with Henry that she has otherwise lost, a mutual exchange once mirrored by their own bodies. Perhaps George would be able to see it with clearer eyes if he admits to himself how precisely the curve of the lady's thigh resembles Mark's own.

The thought unsettles him slightly, so he hides it beneath brashness, brazening out the blush he can feel creeping up from under his collar.

"And are you hoping this will prove instructive to His Majesty? A visual aid to help him find his way, perhaps?"

She swats him playfully, laughing. "And you should know." It is one of her more cryptic statements, the kind that leaves him briefly breathless with the possibility of his discovery, and for several seconds he cannot meet her eyes. But Anne is continuing blithely, unaware of the small crisis she has caused.

"It is after the Grecian style," she says. "A fresco. I liked its unusualness, its…" She makes a vague, descriptive gesture, searching for the word. " - Its _humanity_. Not gods vain-glorying gods, but a _connection_, something earthy, _real_…" She seems excited by the potential this affords, pursuing novelty just as her husband sheds the old world skin.

"It's certainly unique." Admittedly, he sounds more sarcastic than he intended. She is looking for disapproval in him, despite her studied insouciance, and he feels her bristle at his words.

"Unique?" she demands, her voice airily challenging. "George, I do so worry for your sensibilities as a man of the modern order. You can be so incorrigibly obtuse at times; sometimes I wonder if you do it deliberately." She is being extravagant in her performance of annoyance, yet the quicksilver glint of a smile in her eyes only seems to increase her danger, making her too quick to catch and too cruel to trust. "How are we ever to enlighten you?"

"I don't need to be," George says. "It already seems fairly plain that something is afoot."

He doesn't necessarily mean it as a barb, but her eyes sharpen nonetheless.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Only that I can smell one of your schemes at twenty paces. The King barely stands a chance once you start plotting."

"And it was always that way, I suppose?"

He blinks at the naked resentment of her tone, all traces of jocularity lost. For a moment, she looks hating, and hateful, and George doesn't want to admit it, but he is afraid of her.

"You know that was never my intent," he says at last, trying for gentleness, but she moves past him and tugs the drape back into place, hiding the painting from view. Her back is to him, but he can still read her anger in the taut lines of her shoulders. In the silence, he hears her breathing.

"Anne - " he begins uncertainly, but she cuts across him, her voice soft enough to stop him dead.

"I suppose you think I'm foolish…"

"Of course not - "

"…or dishonest. Which is worse? A blind wife or a willing deceiver? Because, George - " At last she turns to look at him, and her eyes are too bright, awash with grief, or fury, or fear. "The terrible, terrible thing is that, perhaps, I am both."

"Anne…don't…"

She makes a fractured sound as she tosses her head, something not quite a chuckle, more half-formed than his own instinctive sigh of dismay. Her skirts swish restlessly against the floor as she moves away from the canvas, within his grasp now but still too fearful to be touched, though he knows he should do - touch her, hold her, stop her, put all of this away from her…his little sister, his Queen, the girl in the gardens of some other arcadia.

"Maybe I am a…_deceiver_." She laughs horribly as she says it. "But can I be blamed? Perhaps it is the only way to survive in the world - "

"Anne," he says, catching her hand at last. "_Stop_."

She meets him, chin tilted up to hold her defiance steady even as her eyes are shining still with unshed tears.

For a moment, neither of them speaks, until George grows aware that he is holding her wrist too tightly, fingers bruising the pale skin and leaving their memory there for the days to come. He releases his pressure on her, instead putting his other hand on her belly where the swelling is just beginning to show.

"Do you not have _everything _that you wanted? What else is there, Anne?"

She presses her lips together, like a child refusing to confess. For a moment, he thinks that she isn't going to say anything, but then she sighs, looking away with a slow blink, moving her own hand to rest over his, over Henry's child.

"There isn't anything else," she says finally.

"Then why…" He gestures helplessly, at her, at the canvas, eyeless again and watching them without mercy. "Why this?"

She is silent again before she answers. "It is for her."

"_Her_?" George would never claim his ability to second guess his sister, but this he has not expected.

"I want her to see it." Anne moves away from him, leaving his hand still flexed in surprise. "And when she does, she will know. The jewel of my heart is for no one else, and the unhappy wench would be wise to keep her fingers to herself."

She is triumphant again, but George feels no less uneasy. He watches her as she crosses the room back to where the painting stands, plucking the edge of the drape so that it falls more smoothly across the canvas.

"Be careful, Anne," George says at last, even though he is not entirely sure what it is that either of them have to fear.

She looks back at him with a smile. "I am, George," she says. "I always am."

* * *

**Next time: 'Cromwell himself has followed the possibility through in his own mind; he knows very well what this could entail, not just for him, but for his Reformation. Try as he might to deny it, he knows full well that all that it stands for is bound up in the figure of that one woman, with her outlandish French mannerisms and fire-blue cat's eyes.'**


	5. A Place of Secrecy

**A/N: Huge thanks again to everyone who has read/reviewed, new and old. I'm a shameless feedback-whore and all comments are always very much appreciated/loved/stroked fondly :D **

**LadyG: I'm particularly glad you enjoyed Chapter 1 so much, since that was the chapter I was most unsure about (let's just say I don't rate my abilities at writing 'tension' between characters :D). While sadly there's no Boleyn/Cromwell interaction in this part, and I can't absolutely guarantee it in the next, I promise that there will be a LOT more later on…and I'm hoping it'll be worth the wait =D**

**Apologies to all Brandon-lovers; I'm a little harsh on the guy in this chapter.**

* * *

5.

Cromwell paces the sleek oak floor of his office, the surfaces of the surrounding desks lined with the condemnation warrants that must be completed by the week's end. The clerks have been dismissed until further notice, and nothing can be done until the business is over with. The silence that he usually craves is unsettling him, and he jumps when the door creaks reflexively in the through-draft of the wind.

Brandon knows that he is keeping him waiting. He is having a marvellous time knowing that.

It's largely redundant, he concludes, to even attempt going back to the beginning and trying to trace what went wrong, but he does anyway. What it was about him. They have never exactly been introduced. His rise through the ranks was a slow segue into Brandon's own life, but the Duke himself had always, somehow, been there in his. Cromwell was polite every infrequent time their paths did cross on his way up, offering his senior courtier, His Grace, a respectful bow, straightening to see the other man's eyes harden like two flat, burnished pennies every time. Perhaps it was from the moment Cromwell's required obeisances became less of an abasement, when those around him began to flock and bob like pigeons in recognition of his own ascent. It is not, after all, his rightful place. His blood flows with the silt of Putney; his veins are not gilt-lined, his lineage does not carry the birthright of the Confessor. Somehow, over the years, Brandon's gaze has soured to resentment whenever it comes to rest on the Chancellor. Cromwell can only wonder why. Is this not the New World, after all? Rabelais himself thinks that one day the revolution will be borne by the hands of bakers and washerwomen. Maybe one day the Duke of Suffolk will acknowledge his own rightful place - acceptance.

He does not come. Cromwell paces. The corridor outside his door mocks him with its silence.

It is, he must concede, entirely possible that the Duke will not come. It will not be the first time Brandon has done this, his time entirely expendable in the pursuit of the torment of those whose position in life should remain strictly beneath his own. Liaising with Brandon is the last thing Cromwell could ever have envisaged as a priority, but in this case it seems unfortunately essential. His Grace possesses connections in the north that far exceed any slender ties of concord Cromwell himself has managed to cultivate amongst the power of the old families. The laughable thing is that Brandon was neither born into it nor inherited it as right himself, but rather acquired it through his own association with His Majesty, an ennobling long in the gestation. There was once a time, Cromwell knows, somewhere preceding Brandon's marriage to the Princess Margaret, God rest her soul, that his primary distinction in life among even his own peers had been as the son of a whore. Memories are surprisingly short amongst the new gentry, jealous of their power, snapping like dogs at the fingers of those who try to pluck it from them.

If His Grace will not come, then Cromwell must rein his mind back to the many and sundry other tasks in hand. He attempts something with one of the governmental warrants, not knowing precisely what it is that he will write as he searches impatiently for ink amongst the mess on his desk. The state that the office has been allowed to get into over the last few days of fevered activity is a disgrace, with books on the shelves rummaged into disorder, several reports from Lincolnshire piled haphazardly on the floor, slumping over onto their sides from where they have been thumbed through and abandoned for future reference, and those writs, endless piles of them, the futility of completing half a dozen nightmarish for the unlimited number that pile up in their wake. Professional success has restricted the time Cromwell can devote to housekeeping, his own and that of his clerks, but disorder bothers him just as it always has.

He is somewhere in-between this nervous agitation at the condition of his work environment, and his distracted attempts at focusing his mind to the task in hand around his simmering irritation at the timekeeping skills of His Grace, Suffolk, when someone shakes the handle of the door to the tradesmen's entrance so hard that the lock is still swinging when Cromwell eventually manages to persuade himself to venture down the corridor to investigate. He tries the lock, then goes back to the office to locate the key. The handle resists, as usual, beneath his grasp, but when he gets the door open his breath smokes in the frigid air as he steps outside, looking beyond the entrance to the trees that run the full length of the chancellery; it is impossible to distinguish what could be recent footprints from the mingled tracks of tradesmen's boots and the wheel-prints of carts brought right up to the door. Whoever has been there has already fled.

He listens to the rusted, years-old _clink _as he re-locks the door. Sometimes thieves, opportunists, the dregs of the city attempt to get in and steal whatever they can to sell on, ink and paper in particular being valuable commodities and liable to buy an enterprising miscreant a week's worth of ale should he hike the price accordingly. Money is never kept on the premises overnight, but that doesn't stop optimistic attempts on the building's security. For some reason, that very security, or relative absence of it, never seems to unsettle anyone but Cromwell. It was he who ordered that the Sergeant-of-Arms place a sentry at the door to the building at all times, to be relieved at night on rotation. It makes him almost breathless with horror to think that prior to his instalment as Chancellor, there was precious little guarding the contents of the chancellery from the ill-intent of any vagabond who summoned enough clarity through the stupor of drink and poverty to try his luck with a door-handle. And to think they said More had turned vagrants off his land.

Whatever it was, it has made him so nervous that by the time he hears the outer door to the office being opened, he has a letter opener in his hand and is prepared to use it.

A moment later, Brandon appears.

"Did you attempt to get in through the tradesmen's entrance a while ago?" is the first thing Cromwell asks him.

Brandon's expression, never courteous at the best of times when directed at Cromwell, only tightens with annoyance. Clearly he detects a barb.

"And why would I do that, Cromwell?" Here, in privacy, there is no requirement for him to use Cromwell's formal title, and not on account of mutual familiarity. "I would have thought that was more your territory?"

Cromwell smiles a little, devoid of amusement. His Grace has never been a stickler for originality.

"Somebody tried the door while I was working. An opportunist hoping chance was his fortune, I'm sure."

Brandon's gaze doesn't flicker, nor does the contemptuous curl to his lip. He would clearly have rather had his privy parts pulled asunder from his person with hot pliers than be standing in this room.

"Something you would have good understanding of, I am sure."

Cromwell isn't in the mood for this. He goes back behind his desk and sits down, not bothering to invite the other man to do the same. He wouldn't have accepted, anyway.

"I did ask to see you…" he begins. Brandon has remained by the desk nearest the door, as though he fears that Cromwell is the incubator of some pox or contagion that will fly on the breath of miasma and creep beneath the Duke's own skin. For some reason, Cromwell has expected to be interrupted, and he hesitates, looking up at Brandon. He knows uncertainty is written on his features. Hatred is not something that comes easily to Cromwell; contrary to what he knows is believed of him, he neither holds grudges nor acts out of spite. He prefers to keep affairs strictly impersonal. The concerns of the heart and the conduct of business are perilous when allowed to interfere with one another, and yet there are times, before he can catch himself and talk sense back into his feelings, that he finds himself loathing Brandon…not because of who Brandon is, or how he treats Cromwell, but for how he makes Cromwell feel. He is a man whose most private heart is staunched the moment he walks through the gates of Westminster, who feels, if not pride, then a certain satisfaction with his ability to turn a neutral eye to even the most vitriolic of insults, and yet there is something about Brandon that shakes him to his core. Doubtless he is largely effective at disguising his unease, but there have been times when Cromwell has picked up a quill after an encounter with the Duke, and seen the slender arc of the feather tremble in his grasp.

"Am I supposed to guess what it is?" He meets Brandon's eye as the other man speaks. The Duke looks, understandably enough, impatient.

"A have a - " Cromwell considers, making a thoughtful gesture with his two hands, fingers splaying, then curling inward. "A small request, from His Majesty."

"Oh?" In these moments, Brandon's primary mode of resistance is monosyllabism. Cromwell may be able to summon him, but damn it all if he'll persuade him to engage in conversation.

"Yes." Cromwell evens the edges of a sheaf of paper, reassurance to be found in a regression to clerking duties. "You may already be aware that His Majesty desires to pay court to the Lady Jane Seymour." He looks up again, questioning, ensuring that Brandon is, indeed, aware. The Duke returns his gaze frostily. That would be a yes, then.

"His Majesty has let it be known to me that he wishes that a certain place of secrecy might be found, somewhere private and discreet, so that he may meet with Mistress Seymour away from the danger of - shall we say? - prying eyes." There is no need to mention the Queen by name.

"And what is this to me?" Brandon says flatly. Cromwell licks his lips.

"His Majesty desires that you, Your Grace, should find this place of secrecy."

Brandon does not discernibly react. His eyes move exploratively across Cromwell's face, perhaps searching for a qualification or a dupe. Cromwell holds his gaze, trying for earnestness. This is not the time for idle quarrelling, and the sooner he can convince His Grace of this, the better.

"Why is it that I should be tasked with this?" he eventually says. "Surely clerical matters of this nature are more your jurisdiction, Mr Secretary." In Brandon's mouth, the address becomes an obscenity, both slandering Cromwell's impertinence in his hold of that position and disparaging his distinct inferiority of rank.

A pause. Cromwell taps the pads of his fingertips together, trying to regain diplomacy. "It is what the King wishes," he says at last, his voice slow with his delicate choice of words. "And what the King wishes, he must have."

"I see." Brandon's stance is still impeccable, his shoulders squared, his hands clasped behind him. He has not moved since he positioned himself by the door. "And this has nothing to do with you?"

Cromwell closes his eyes a moment, briefly ruing the obstinacy of the aristocratic mindset.

"I assure Your Grace that I am acting purely in the interests of His Majesty's pleasure." And how horribly true that is. "I would gladly take this task upon myself if it had been required of me, but alas - " He cannot resist the jibe, a smile sliding sidelong onto his face - "The duty must fall to you."

"And where does the King presume that I should find this _place of secrecy_?"

"I think we are both content to leave that to your own discretion. I will of course be willing to inspect it for its appropriateness."

"How generous of you," Brandon says dryly. Cromwell feels his smile sharpen at the edges.

"However," he goes on, opening one of the drawers to his desk and taking out a small, leather-bound notebook, "there are a number of places that His Majesty has preference for, although he insists that this should in no way curtail your search." He extends his hand, not standing, offering the book to Brandon. His Grace will have to re-discover his capacity for movement if this discussion is going to have anything resembling a productive outcome. "His only condition is that it should be somewhere north of the border."

"Why the north?" Brandon demands sharply, looking at the notebook in Cromwell's hand as though it is the original poisoned chalice itself. Cromwell's shoulders move slightly in a shrug.

"I have no idea."

He wonders why Brandon is so resistant to the proposal. For Brandon, the King's dalliance with Mistress Seymour can only have a beneficial result, and His Grace has made no secret of his dislike of the Queen and all she represents - the hubris of the lowborn clinging to the backs of the powerful, the avarice of upward mobility…the peril of the educated woman. Seymour, with her country maid's gaucheness and tentative grasp on her own lettering, is precisely the antidote to Brandon's disquiet as much as it is to the King's own growing weariness with the Queen's flashing temper and jealous demands on his faithfulness. Surely His Grace should be leaping at the opportunity to potentially unseat the Boleyns, and to what end? Cromwell himself has followed the possibility through in his own mind; he knows very well what this could entail, not just for him, but for his Reformation. Try as he might to deny it, he knows full well that all that the Reformation stands for is bound up in the figure of that one woman, with her outlandish French mannerisms and fire-blue cat's eyes. Henry Tudor outstretched the might of his hand to pluck Earth from the coat-tails of Heaven not through the zeal of his passion for change, but through the transient, all-consuming need to bed the one woman who resisted him. And Cromwell knows that without Anne, this precious new world, the bakers and the washerwomen lining up for their right of life, could easily fall back into darkness.

But he still feels her eyes on his throat…

"And I suppose that when…_if_ I locate this _place of secrecy _- " Brandon is still uttering the words as though they are as sour as corked wine - "then I am to report to you?"

Cromwell nods. "I am to approve it before it is presented to His Majesty."

In three long, angry strides, Brandon is at Cromwell's desk, and he snatches up the notebook. Cromwell regards him calmly. He prefers Brandon when he knows he has rankled him.

"I tell you, Mr Cromwell," the Duke says through gritted teeth, his eyes so black with hatred that the fine hairs on the back of Cromwell's neck tingle. "If this little jaunt turns out to have all been some foolish wild goose chase, then your head will not be spared."

Cromwell returns the stare, feeling the muscles in his face freeze into a mask of impassivity. "Good day, Your Grace," he says.

For a moment, he almost thinks Brandon is going to hit him. But then the Duke's mouth hardens into a sneer of disgust, he turns on his heel, and he makes the door in as many strides as it took him to reach Cromwell. The latch snaps home in his wake.

Cromwell gazes after him, the nerve-endings beneath the surface of his skin alive with adrenaline. Two threats to his life in one month. A small record, even by his standards.

He draws the quill from its holder, dousing its nib in the fresh ink. The long feather quivers where he holds it, but he has not yet written a line.

* * *

**A/N: Historically, Anne Boleyn's eyes were indeed dark, but since this is based on the show and not reality, and Natalie Dormer has blue eyes, blue eyes this Anne shall have.**

**Francois Rabelais was a Renaissance writer, doctor and humanist, who first introduced the idea of the perfectibility of the human race that the likes of Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, eventually took up and developed. I'm almost certainly taking a massive liberty with the idea that Cromwell had even heard of him, and he's really just mentioned here for fun.**

**Next time: '"I know where it is," Cromwell hears himself snapping, because he knows the name and the knows the man. Even before Wyatt had finished speaking, he knew.'**


	6. The Box Opened

**A/N: This is a kind of 'goes nowhere' chapter, in which Cromwell bitches about his work and we're introduced to my amusing cast of random, anonymous clerks, but is kind of necessary for setting up the groundwork for future PLOT (because believe it or not, there will actually be something at least resembling that at some point!). So I hope people will bear with me on this. Apologies for the continuing absence of Anne, which I'm hoping to remedy soon. **

**As ever, thanks for reading, and if you felt like reviewing, that would be awesome too.**

* * *

6.

He does not sleep.

In what is becoming something of a routine for him, Cromwell rises shortly after he hears the clock across the courtyard strike three, and makes his way by touch through into his study. Some habits are harder to break than others, and to save his candles he opens the inner shutters on the window over his desk so that a wash of moonlight illuminates the contents of his bureau. It is a good night for this.

* * *

Approximately a quarter of a mile away, in the velvet-lined darkness of the Queen's Apartments, Anne is awoken by the first stirrings of the child in her belly. She lies half-beneath the coverlet, one arm crooked at an angle under the twist of her body, the other resting limply where the tender ridge of her hip curves into her thigh. It is with this hand that she explores the curious swelling of her stomach with her fingertips, so familiar to her and yet still so infinitely alien. The tiny life responds as if to her touch, jumping against where she lays her palm flat.

"Hello, my prince," she whispers.

She will not sleep.

* * *

"Coffee?"

"Thank you, Chapman."

It suffices as a 'Good morning'. Chapman is apparently restricted to two syllables an hour before sunrise. During the winter, he is even less communicable. He has worked in the chancellery for at least a thousand years, has seen the passing of both of Wolsey and More, along with countless other personages that he surely cares to neither name nor remember, and has never ascended beyond the rank of Chief Clerk. It is entirely possible that he does not wish to. When Cromwell was first appointed Chancellor, he thought that he detected a distinct rancorousness in the old man's manner, a certain belligerence in his shuffling to and from the records room, his ancient, domed back bent even further under the weight of stacks of documents, huffing in apparent discontent as he deposited them on Cromwell's desk. Cromwell was largely horrified at the idea of putting the old workhorse to such relentless activity, particularly when the likelihood appeared to increase day by day of Chapman falling subject to some violent apoplexy, but his underlings remained bafflingly philosophical when he ventured to voice his concerns about it.

"Old Arthur's been through Agincourt and out the other side - " Cromwell suspected that this, at least, was not entirely true - "He's been lugging them books around for as long as he's had legs. Don't worry about him, sir."

It was not exactly comforting.

He was also unsettled by Chapman's apparent resistance to conversation. Cromwell himself was not inclined towards idle chatter during the working day (during _any_ part of the day, for that matter), nor did he encourage or condone it amongst his men, but he had been rather taken aback once having enquired after the health of Chapman's family (the fellow had a wife, he knew, at the least), only to receive in return a long, baleful stare from beneath fearsomely grizzled eyebrows, before Chapman creaked in an about-face and limped off. Puzzled and inexplicably hurt by the snub, Cromwell could only conclude that a certain recalcitrant mutiny was afoot.

Yet it came about that one evening several months ago, Cromwell had returned to his office following a particularly troubling encounter with the King. He was aware that Chapman was the only other clerk to have remained behind (nothing out of the ordinary in itself), but he determined to try his best to ignore the old man's presence, expecting Chapman to do the same. He had not been in a frame of mind for conversation, anyway; after settling at his desk, he had spent several minutes attempting to still the trembling in his hands, pretending that he was deeply absorbed in the bills for the new parliament and all the while focusing on the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, willing himself back into clarity and trying to subdue the malicious part of his imagination that kept presenting to him multifarious images of his own imminent demise by noose, axe or stake.

But his nerves had remained stubbornly disarrayed, to the point where he was almost distracted with frustration with himself. He was aware of Chapman leaving the room and had felt himself relax a little in gratitude for the privacy in which he might at least attempt to pull himself together.

But almost straight away, the old man had returned. This time, instead of stacks of bills, or armfuls of reports, he had been bearing a small hip-flask, holding it in both hands as though he expected to unbalance at any moment and spill its contents.

He reached Cromwell's side and regarded him wordlessly for several seconds. He seemed to undergo a small internal debate with himself, during which either the better or the worse side of him won, and he proffered the flask.

"Drink this." Or else?

Cromwell had briefly considered the possibility of being poisoned, but that had seemed too eccentric an act even for Chapman. He had accepted the flask, albeit tentatively, and with one last enquiring glance up at Chapman, who had nodded once like a father overseeing his son's first incompetent attempts at Leviticus, put his lips to the mouth of the bottle and took a small sip.

It was brandy, and a good one at that. He had felt its warmth coursing the length of his throat as he swallowed, a certain ferocity in its aftertaste that made him grimace and enough of a kick to bring him to the verge of a shiver.

"I'd keep it, if I was you," Chapman had said when Cromwell tried to give the flask back to him. It was the first time Cromwell had heard him utter a complete sentence.

"I couldn't - "

"I think you need it more than I do."

He had wanted to repay the old man's generosity, had attempted to again and again, but even when he had tried to make a small addition to Chapman's pay-packet from his own pocket that December, he had gone into to work the next morning only to find the coins stacked neatly on his desk. Such wilful extension of charity, such fierce adherence to pride…such _foolishness_…was not something Cromwell had ever encountered before. He was deeply touched by it, and it took him a long time to fully come to terms with the idea that Chapman neither expected nor desired recompense. In Cromwell's world, there was no such thing as a free act of virtue.

Nothing changed, of course, from that moment; or at least, Chapman continued in very much the way he always had, and was neither more or less communicative, or in any way more familiar in his manner towards Cromwell. As for Cromwell, once he had reconciled himself to the idea that he had accidentally become the recipient of a random act of kindness, he determined to at least attempt to live with the disquieting sense of indebtedness that he had been left with. He wasn't entirely sure whether it made Chapman's general demeanour easier or more difficult to bear, but at least his fears of sedition had been somewhat allayed.

Still, he had never quite been able to bring himself to finish the brandy. Its remaining contents found themselves shared out and enjoyed amongst the members of Cromwell's small household. An early Christmas present.

Chapman brings the coffee. It isn't customary, Cromwell knows, but this early in the morning he finds the medicinal benefits of the black, usually foul-tasting liquid far outweigh the peculiar looks he gets whilst drinking it. His men have resigned him to a certain eccentricity by now. Cromwell has estimated that on mornings when he has a headache as ferocious as the one he is presently inflicted with that it should take around two cups of the vile stuff to reduce the sharp pain that settles behind his left eye to a dull murmur, and possibly another half a cup to similarly render the throbbing at the base of his skull to something only a little more than a tiresome irritation. By now, Chapman has become rather a dab hand at not just preparing the mixture, but at detecting by way of some mysterious power of intuition precisely when his master will be requiring it. Or maybe, Cromwell thinks grimly as he pulls his chair up to his desk, he just looks so terrible this morning that even the King himself would have offered to run to the apothecary.

He takes a sip and sifts through the first batch of reports that have found their way onto his desk since last night. Or earlier this morning. Or whenever it was that he finally surrendered himself to an hour or so's fruitless staring at the canopy of his bed. Three from Haines up in Clitheroe already. Dammit. He knows there is a good deal of popular discontent over the imminent auction of the abbey there, but Haines's neurotic insistence on sending back the minutiae of the locals' every breath and nose blow is starting to get ridiculous.

Not to mention - he slits Haines's most recent epistle open and scans it resentfully - extremely tiresome.

It alludes to one of the new parliamentary bills. He eventually locates it beneath a stack of pamphlets that he is supposed to approve for public distribution, and searches for the relevant passage. There. The proposal that certain of the religious houses' former occupants be allowed to remain in residence as tenanted custodians, provided they pay annual rent to the Crown. Doubtless a controversial proposal, and one entirely liable to be abused by unscrupulous churchmen who would inevitably find themselves mysterious beneficiaries of the rent-roll. The people of Clitheroe are wise to be suspicious, as Haines has already told him. Several times.

He takes out paper and quill to pen a reply, his head throbbing in protest at the smell of the ink. He's fairly confident that he's developing some sort of physical aversion to it. He takes intermittent sips of coffee as he writes, the scratch of the quill-nib a feverish staccato in the quiet room. He fills a page, takes another, refreshes his quill, begins again.

Byrne is in, just as he is signing his name. "More reports for you, sir." He deposits them on the desk apologetically.

Cromwell pauses, blinks a speck of blurriness from his left eye, pinches the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb.

"See that this is despatched post-haste to Lancashire," he says, blowing the sand from his drying signature. Byrne watches him as he makes a fold in the letter sharp enough to cut fingertips and stamps the seal into the hot wax.

"Haines, sir?"

"Who else?"

"Doom-mongering again?"

"I would expect no less of him."

"Has the north actually fallen to the Infidel yet or do we have a couple of days in hand?"

Cromwell smiles thinly. "I should be glad to favour such enthusiasm amongst my officers."

"Just not on a Monday, eh?" Byrne says cheerily. He makes a fleeting half-bow - "Thank you, sir" - and spirits the letter away, his step inexplicably jaunty.

Cromwell sighs as he puts the quill back in its holder. He's on his second cup of coffee and wonders about the wisdom of having a third. His headache has not so much lessened as retreated to somewhere near the back of his head, as though he has been firmly thumped there and can expect a lump the size of a small fist to materialise at some point in the near future. He rubs his eyes with his fingers and rests his elbows on the desk a moment, hands still over his face, considering his next move. Either stay here and work through the rest of the reports, or go and see if he can find Hulbert and extract from him the prints for the new wing block His Majesty has expressed an interest in seeing built.

He chooses, brief, freedom.

When he gets back to his office, Hulbert having proved to be especially elusive that morning, Thomas Wyatt is already waiting for him.

"Loitering with intent again, Mr Wyatt?" he says. Wyatt laughs as he turns to follow him through the arch and past the partition screen into the inner section of Cromwell's office. Cromwell gestures to one of his clerks to bring wine, and the man bobs in acknowledgement before ducking from the room.

"I tried to pick a day when I thought I might at least stand a chance of catching you momentarily liberated from the accounts books," Wyatt says. He is holding a suspiciously meticulous-looking envelope in his hand. That can only mean one thing.

"Another disgruntled exclamation from the provinces?" Cromwell nods at the envelope, raising a wryly expectant eyebrow. Wyatt shakes his head in mock-disapproval.

"You're no fun anymore, you know," he says. This elicits a dark chuckle from Cromwell, who gestures to the chair opposite his desk before sitting down himself. The temporary respite from his desk has done a little to clear his head, but now his back aches in protest at being folded into the chair again. Damn it all, but he's getting old…

"Explain yourself, Tom," he says, rolling his shoulders back in an attempt to at least loosen some of the painful tension that is running across the breadth of his back and up into the sinews of his neck. A joint cracks forbodingly.

"It's not what you're thinking," Wyatt says as he sits down.

"Really." Cromwell is not convinced.

"No." Wyatt's hands move to open the already broken seal on the envelope. "No fretful priests this time. Agnes Seward has been in contact again." As he speaks he unfolds the broadsheet of the letter, folded over onto itself like a tablecloth and feasibly large enough to serve as one, crossed from top to bottom, left to right, with a cramped, unsteady hand, the author attempting to pack as much information into the already generous space as possible. Clearly she has a lot to say for herself. "You know she was recently widowed?"

"Yes." Cromwell frowns as he tries to precisely place the name, sorting through the cluttered list of widows, lay-offs and sundry other plaintiffs who come to the Treasury with a plight, a household of empty bellies and no apparent solution every day without fail. Agnes Seward only stands out insofar as Cromwell has met her husband, a bricklayer, several times, had liked him, and had made a mental note to himself to provide the fellow with work at some point in the future. As events conspired, it had slipped his mind (he seems to correlate it somehow with the Italian emissary, a coronet of sapphires mistakenly intended for the Dowager Princess but intercepted by the Queen's household in her new capacity, and a potentially flammable diplomatic situation that arose from it all). In-between soothing ruffled foreign feathers and reassuring fractious ambassadorial tempers, the death of Richard Seward, brick-layer and pleasant fellow, had gone unfortunately unnoticed.

"Apparently she and her twelve children - " Wyatt pauses to let the number of this particular gaping nestful sink in, his eyes finding Cromwell's with a mixture of amusement and dismay - "are entirely dependent on her late husband's pension of fifteen pounds a year, but his employer is refusing to own up with it."

"Has she not consulted with the constable of the parish?"

"From what I hear the fellow Seward worked for has - " Wyatt pauses a moment, visibly searching for a word to assist his description. "Useful connections," is the cryptic phrase he settles on.

The clerk is back, and Cromwell waits while wine is poured and Wyatt makes his customary remark about the inadequacy of the Crown's cellar while encouraging the clerk to fill his goblet to the brim.

Once they are alone again, Cromwell laces his fingers and regards the younger man across the desk. There is something Wyatt is not telling him.

"And what of Seward's employer?"

A flicker of unease passes across Wyatt's face. He has always been hopelessly transparent in hiding his emotions.

"Ah." He looks down at the letter, fingering its crisp edges, giving an entirely convincing performance of a schoolboy reluctant to confess to a misdeed. "That might be considered a small complication."

"Meaning?" Whether it be through experience, a certain cynicism of nature, or just plain old fashioned paranoia, Cromwell has the distinct impression that he isn't going to like this.

"Meaning you might be familiar with the name."

"Mr Wyatt…" He is already tired of the intrigue; tiny fingers of apprehension are tracing their way up his spine.

Wyatt sighs, the muscles in his jaw flexing as he briefly clenches his teeth. "In his capacity as a bricklayer, and also in other various, less clearly defined roles, Richard Seward worked for one Stephen Abelard, of Wandsworth, Greater London."

"I know where it is," Cromwell hears himself snapping, because he knows the name and the knows the man. Even before Wyatt had finished speaking, he knew.

There is a small silence. The poet is tentatively searching Cromwell's face, his eyes asking the question before he even dares open his mouth again.

"So it's true then?" he says, eventually, his voice careful, gently enquiring, as though he expects Cromwell to react with some passion to any other sort of prompt.

"If you mean, is it true that I knew the man…then, yes, it is true." He finds himself not quite wanting to meet Wyatt's eyes. Always, always his past stalks after him, the tenacious ghost at his heels that he will never quite allay. "Or at least, it is true that my father knew him." It feels like a confession, one that will sully him and everything he touches from hereafter. He wants that man, his father, nowhere near any of this, _damn_ him…

"So old Stephen has something of a name for himself?" He knows Wyatt doesn't mean it the way it sounds, but it still smarts to hear the connection made.

He isn't interested in speculating. Nor is it remotely useful in this case. "What do you mean by 'less clearly defined roles'?"

"Exactly that. Apparently, Seward did some unofficial work for Abelard on the side. I've done some asking around and no one seems to know precisely what it was. Or at least no one wanted to tell me. All I know at the moment is that Seward supplemented his income with a few errands here and there, none of which were ever specified, and which all tended to be for the benefit of his old governor. Seems like he had to, really, with all the spare mouths to feed." Wyatt makes a small, disbelieving moue. "Almost makes a case for _coitus interruptus_, really."

He should know, of course. Cromwell has never liked to enquire as to quite how diligently, and unofficially, Wyatt has helped to repopulate the land over the years.

"What does Mrs Seward say on the matter?" he asks.

Wyatt shakes his head. "I don't think she knew. From how she writes, you'd think her husband was as clean as they come."

Cromwell wordlessly puts out his hand for the letter and Wyatt gives it to him without query. It is good paper, perhaps the finest Agnes Seward could buy, and it seems almost unbearably poignant to think that the woman has spent a precious amount of her meagre funds just in order to make a good impression on the Treasury. The very place that she is now reduced to begging.

"I want you to go to Wandsworth," he says, looking back up at Wyatt. "Find out as much as you can about Seward's activities there, these _errands_. But under no circumstances are you to tell anyone that you are on business from me."

Wyatt nods, visibly unknotting the qualification behind the instruction. "What about Abelard?"

Cromwell's expression is grim as he meets Wyatt's eyes. "Leave him to me."

Once Wyatt has gone, he puts the letter inside his bureau and locks it. He wants time alone to read it, as many times as needs be, and to think about it, and he has none of that time now. Then he goes next door to Melville's office and tells him to cancel all of Cromwell's appointments for the following morning. Melville obliges without question, but his small eyes are alive with curiosity.

Back in his own office, Cromwell tries to apply himself to what the rest of the day demands of him. Everything else will be dealt with in time, he tells himself, but he cannot concentrate. He thinks of the King, awaiting the discovery of his place of secrecy so that he might take a step further towards making the lady Seymour his queen. Of the present Queen, planning for the future of a prince and a kingdom that might never exist, at least not for her. He thinks of Agnes Seward and her letter on twelve shilling paper.

"Damn it to hell," he whispers.

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**A/N: Yep, Cromwell's a coffee-junkie. As hideously anachronistic as that probably is, coffee, along with tea and chocolate, was used primarily for medicinal purposes in the sixteenth century, as I've kind of implied in this chapter. So maybe it's not too outlandish.**

**Next time: '****"_Please_, Mr Cromwell," she says sharply, her smile mirthless. "Do me the service of _not _pretending to be a fool. It does not become you."'**


	7. Malice Prepense

**Apologies for the long delay in updates. I've been having major issues with inspiration recently and have been a bit overwhelmed with college work, but I'm hoping that at least my muse has come back off his vacation, even if I am still slightly bogged down with reading and dissertation-hell. If it's any kind of compensation, here we finally see the reuniting of Cromwell and Anne (for the time being, anyway :D). As ever, huge thanks to anyone who reads, and I really do appreciate every review I get.**

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7.

"Majesty," he says, without hesitation. It trips off the tongue as readily as the reply to a litany these days. He sweeps aside in a graceful genuflection to let her pass. She does not.

"Mr Cromwell." He has to take a step back in order to avoid the hem of her skirts brushing against his leg as they swish forward in the wake of her slowing beside him. Behind her, her ladies Sheldon and Saville halt uncertainly, Mistress Madge clutching the leash of the Queen's docile spaniel. She glances away hurriedly as Cromwell meets her eye, and, feeling inexplicably cornered by this small mob of women, he looks back at Anne. He is a little surprised to see that she is smiling, although experience tells him that this is rarely a portent of good tidings.

"I have been hearing great praise of your diplomatic skills, Mr Cromwell," she says, her voice almost blithely conversational. She makes a small inclination with her head as she turns again, instructing him to accompany her towards the door, and they move forward into the pale afternoon sunlight.

"I am doubtless unworthy of such praise, madam," he replies, feeling himself slipping almost automatically into the obsequiousness required of his position.

He senses rather than sees Anne smile again. It is a certain quickening in the air, nothing to do with the sharp breeze against which she is suitably protected with muff and fur-lined hood, and he is not. It is less than a month until the start of her confinement, and no doubt she is wanting to make the most of her relative freedom before then.

"You are far too modest, sir," she says easily. Cromwell guesses that he can reliably estimate the course this conversation will take: claim, counter-claim, deflection, parry, pursuing each other in wary circles like ravening wolves on the track of mutually stalked prey, neither wanting to admit to their own starvation. All happily devoid of either speaker's true intent. The modes of courtly conduct are an intriguing paradigm of self-denial.

"According to His Majesty, we have you to thank for the recent acquisition of our new Spanish friends," Anne goes on. Her breath freezes in a cloud as she chuckles softly. "You ought to be careful, Mr Cromwell, or you will be putting Ambassador Chapuys out of a job."

Cromwell smiles. "I am entirely indebted to His Excellency for the furthering of our alliance," he says. "He is a man of…" He pauses to select from the more ambiguous vestiges of his vocabulary - "Of superior integrity."

"Rather like yourself, some would say."

He inclines his head obligingly. So. She has brought him out here to apply her version of an interrogation. Well, he knows this game in his sleep by now.

Their steps have aligned into almost companionable sequence, and gravel crunches in unison. Sheldon and Saville follow at a meekly respectful distance, the dog now bundled in Madge's arms.

"However," the Queen says thoughtfully, after a small silence between them during which Cromwell's mind has wandered longingly back to the warm fire in his office, and the paperwork on his desk, "I must confess that I am curious, Mr Secretary."

He looks at her, an eyebrow raised enquiringly. "Madam?"

She is gazing straight ahead, and the wind-snap has stained the fullness of her cheeks rouge. A small smile twists her flexible mouth. "It is said that you and Ambassador Chapuys have become particularly close of late."

"It has indeed been necessary that he and I liaise over certain matters."

"One almost begins to wonder what else you and His Excellency have been discussing in your private discourses."

This is perhaps the one thing he has not seen coming, and he silently curses himself for allowing himself to be out-manoeuvred.

"Only that which is of benefit to the realm, Your Majesty," he says carefully. "To be sure, it is an interest His Excellency and I have in common: that which safeguards the prospects of our two nations."

"Really." Her tone is flat, almost uninterested. They are approaching the parameter of the gardens, the path cutting sharply to their left, the misted hulks of the trees obscuring the buildings beyond to their right. Anne does not hesitate as they reach the small junction; she turns left, and her train has but to follow.

"Yet what does puzzle me, Mr Secretary, is why you are not entirely more transparent in your dealings with Chapuys."

The cold wind is making Cromwell's mouth dry, or at least that is what he chooses to blame for the difficulty he suddenly finds in swallowing.

"I am not sure I understand, Majesty…"

"No?" She removes a gloved hand from her muff to lightly brush a strand of hair that has been teased loose by the breeze away from her cheek. In the same movement, she slows to a halt and turns to regard him fully. Her eyes are those of a terrible, unknowable sphinx.

Looking back at her, Cromwell suddenly feels a sharp rise of irritation. She has compelled him out here with nary a pretext of courtesy, regardless of the frigid climate nor the demands of his office, and now is expecting him to imperil his health and occupation with nothing to defend either but the inadequate layers of his official robes, while she luxuriates in fur and the superfluity of time all women of quality are tasked to expend at their leisure. Queen or no, the conceit of the lady is quite astounding.

"Madam," he begins evenly, certain that the thin vein of annoyance in his voice is perceptible only to his own ears. "Pray forgive what is I am sure an unforgivable obtuseness on my part, but I am entirely ignorant as to what it is that you are alluding to."

Anne tosses her head as she laughs suddenly, a hard, ringing sound that seems to echo across the silent, deserted expanse of garden. She turns and resumes walking. After a moment, Cromwell follows her, undismissed and helpless to do anything else, attaining her side again in several long strides. Behind them, as ever, he hears the rustling of Nan Saville's and Madge Sheldon's skirts. He would rather have not had an audience.

The Queen's silence endures until they reach the hedgerow that runs adjacent to the fountain.

"I hear that you have sent the Duke of Suffolk on a reconnaissance mission."

Cromwell holds the start of shock he feels in check. He looks across the gardens to where the mist hangs heavy close to the ground as he tries to assemble a reply from his scattered preconceptions. How can she know? _What _does she know?

But Anne is going on, before he has had time to formulate a deflection. "I am glad to see you paid heed to our recent discussion."

That presumably being the one where she expressed a lively interest in seeing the permanent separation of his head from his body. Cromwell swiftly runs through the specifics of the conversation in his mind…_reforms_…_educational causes_…_Wolsey_…_cropped at the neck_…

He takes a risk.

"Your Majesty is referring to the school in Winchester?"

She deigns to nod. "A fitting beneficiary of our monastic funds," she says with satisfaction. "And a worthy focus for Suffolk's talents," she adds, not without a trace of irony.

Cromwell's soft chuckle is as much from relief as it is from the faint absurdity of the idea, none of which he sees is lost on Anne. "I know that His Grace was more than happy to oblige," he says, and if falsehoods are an unforgivable sin, he has just damned himself to Hell and back.

"His Grace has far too much time on his hands," Anne says dryly. "It pleases me to see him suitably occupied. Men are apt to cause mischief when they are allowed to fall to idling."

"Indeed," Cromwell says with an amused smile.

If there is one thing that they share still, surviving in the embers of their shot down alliance, it is the hatred that they equally inspire in the Duke of Suffolk. There is something almost poetic in that, Cromwell thinks: finding accord in the mutual condition of being loathed.

"However, I hope that His Grace is mindful of the grave import of his office," Anne says. "It is my observation that his enthusiasm can be…shall we say, lacking in certain areas?"

Cromwell is silent for a moment as he allows the implication of this statement to sink in. The accusation of treason hangs lightly on the words, spoken so casually anyone else may well have missed it, and Cromwell suspects that the trap is laid there in order to tempt him into infidelity to the King's closest friend, something Anne would be anxious to relay to His Majesty at the nearest opportunity. He knows what the price of imprudent chatter can be, how articles mentioned in passing during an otherwise meaningless conversation can later resurface to be held against you at a trial for your life.

"His Grace is, I am sure, aware of the manifest righteousness and sanctity of our reforms," he says carefully. Anne smirks, her beauty rendered cruel.

"If _you _say so, Mr Secretary," she replies, turning her head just long enough to meet his eyes, "then it must be true."

He clasps his hands more tightly behind him as they walk on.

The chill wind catches them at an angle as they turn out of the protection of the hedgerow, and Cromwell is unable to stave off a shiver that creeps up on him, the breeze nipping at his ears like a sprite. Anne's eyes, bluer than an ocean he has not seen since he was seventeen, are on him in a moment, as any sparring partner senses weakness.

"You are feeling cold, Mr Secretary?" she enquires lightly. "Perhaps we should adjourn inside." She pauses, allowing the beat to bring its full effect to her coda. "A man could catch his death out here."

So much for allies.

"I confess that I am ill-attired for walking," he says, with a self-deprecatory smile. At this, she stops, her eyes full on his face, and then very deliberately, with a unfathomable expression of amusement, or malice, or something entirely different, her gaze moves slowly, almost indulgently, from his face to the slant of his shoulders, and then onward, journeying his full height, taking in the sable fold of his robes, soft black over the denser black of his doublet and breeches, his gloveless hands and stockinged legs, moving across every inch of him as an artist drinks the sight of their subject, seeming somehow to penetrate the inadequate layers of his clothing and scorch his flesh underneath, almost indecently, almost knowingly, and at the mercy of her gaze Cromwell feels himself flushing. He has never felt quite so fully, so thoroughly, so nakedly appraised before.

"You should take better care of yourself, Mr Cromwell," Anne remarks at last, her perusal finally ending back where it started. "So valuable an asset to England as yourself."

He has never heard anything less like a compliment before in his life.

Cromwell clears his throat, feeling inexplicably flustered, still flayed by the sensation of her eyes on him and utterly at a loss as to decipher why.

"Lady Sheldon," Anne says suddenly, and Cromwell glances in surprise at the two ladies-in-waiting standing several feet away. He had entirely forgotten their presence. The Queen is holding out an imperious hand.

"I will walk her for a while," she says, and Madge comes forward holding the spaniel, which submits itself to being briefly fussed by Anne, fingering its glossy ears and kissing its soft, domed head as she coos endearments, before she takes the leash from Lady Sheldon and sets the dog on the ground. Madge drops a small curtsy, whispering a hurried 'Madam…my lord…', and retreats back to where Lady Saville is standing.

The spaniel snuffles speculatively at some fallen leaves as they begin to walk again, but otherwise allows Anne to lead it, placidly, the leash slack between them. Cromwell begins to wonder if he will ever be permitted to return to his office. The intense cold of the day is working its way into his bones, and it is becoming increasingly difficult not to shiver constantly. Not only that, but he strongly suspects that his nose is about to start running, and he feels compelled to either sniff or take out his handkerchief. He is sure that his nose is quite rouged at the tip by now.

"Have you spoken to the King about Mistress Seymour?" Anne asks suddenly.

The unexpected nature of the question almost makes him stammer. He glances at her, but her gaze is set determinedly ahead, eyes hard and blue in her pale, cold-pinched face.

"About what, madam?" he enquires delicately, but she is already shaking her head.

"_Please_, Mr Cromwell," she says sharply, her smile mirthless. "Do me the service of _not _pretending to be a fool. It does not become you."

Cromwell wets his lips, and instantly regrets it as the wind parches them. "I know that His Majesty has mentioned Mistress Seymour on certain occasions," he says, weighing the price of each word before he speaks it. "I believe he judges her as fit to wait upon you at some point in the future."

She gives a proud jerk of her head, a though shaking off his words. "That is _my _decision," she snaps, her voice harsh, jealous, stung by the losses that they both know she endures but neither dares to speak.

"I am sure His Majesty has only your best interests at heart, madam," Cromwell says cautiously, loathing himself even as he hears himself utter the empty, meaningless platitude. He barely stifles a flinch when Anne laughs.

"Oh, of course he has," she says bitterly. "Only my best interests."

There is a sudden fierce gust of wind, one that sends the skeletons of leaves skittering towards them on the path and blows Anne's hood straight back, exposing her dark, fretted hair. It catches the tail of Cromwell's robes, billowing them out behind him, and he shivers again uncontrollably, miserable with the cold.

"You should go inside, Mr Cromwell," Anne says. Suddenly, she sounds tired; not snide or caustic, but weary.

"Perhaps Your Majesty should do the same." He feels strangely reluctant to leave her, as though he is somehow responsible for the vacillating frenzy and despair of her predicament. Which, on second thoughts, he probably is, at least in part, but this is not something he has ever allowed to trouble him before.

Anne shakes her head, once, curtly. "No. I wish to walk a little longer."

He hesitates, halfway towards a bow of departure, unsure of the wisdom of either staying or leaving. "Is…?" he says, uncertainly, then with more purpose: "Is there anything that I might do for Your Majesty?"

"_No_," she flares suddenly, eyes flashing with the abruptness of her passion. She turns so sharply to face him that the leash snaps taut, and the spaniel yelps in pain as it is dragged off its feet. Cromwell takes a step back at the cold fury he sees in Anne's eyes. Her loveliness is…almost merciless now, almost unearthly, not the milk and temperance of the pastorals of ideal womanhood, but witching her beauty through ferocity and hatred.

"The only thing you can do that will be of any service to me would be to keep away from me," she says, almost spitting the words out in her anger . "I have neither desire to speak to you, nor to lay eyes upon you, beyond that which is an evil necessity. So kindly do not trouble yourself to be courteous to me." Her lip curls contemptuously. "I am not interested in your pretty phrases or your empty flattery."

Cromwell stares back at her, no less astonished than if she had struck him. Her nostrils dilate and contract as she breathes, her eyes fierce on his face, before she turns on her heel, the suddenness of the movement making him blink.

Both Saville and Sheldon hurry after her, pausing only to bob in acknowledgement as they pass him by.

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**Next time: 'In a moment, she recalls Cromwell's eyes in the garden that day, the trick of the light that had made them seem green.'**


	8. All or None

**A/N: As ever, thanks for the feedback, guys :)**

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8.

That evening, the King visits her apartments.

Not her bed, she marks, not without some resentment, though of course the practical part of her mind prompts her that anything of _that _nature would have been entirely out of the question in her present condition. Still, it seems like progress after weeks of physical and emotional distance, an end to the unspoken impasse that has left her sleep-starved and sick of her food.

"I had a mind to enquire after your health, sweetheart," he says, once her ladies have been dismissed from the room and it is just the two of them beside the fireplace, she sitting, her black-work at rest in her lap, he standing, his lithe hands restlessly working together where he clasps them behind his back. Anne knows without even being able to see that he is turning the gold signet ring on his finger around and around, a futile tic of nervous energy that even now seems to crackle off him, all the more unsettling for his comparative stillness.

Even so, she notes the endearment with a flicker of pleasure, something she is careful to check the moment she begins to feel it stirring within her. She must not let down her guard just yet.

"Yours," Henry is going on, with too deliberate a casualness for an afterthought, "and that of our child. Have you felt it move recently?" He smiles at her, a little, as though he can gently brush aside the transparency of his enquiry; that his concern for her safety is intrinsically bound up in her state as vessel to the precious jewel within, and that without one, the other would not exist, and nor, perhaps, would his fear for her.

If Anne feels a sting of hurt at this, it is indistinguishable from the proud lift of her head and her winning smile. She has rehearsed this often enough, as any consummate actress would.

"Just this morning, my love," she says. "And all of last night, too. He nigh on keeps me awake with his kicking."

"Our son is strong." It is almost a question, uncertain; for the first time there is a thread of anxiety in his voice that Anne attunes to instinctively, and she feels an almost overwhelming surge of love for him, for that bruising vulnerability that she alone has glimpsed from time to time and that makes her long to take him in her arms as she would her own child, their own son, and to soothe away the concerns, the cares that she knows he has borne for so long, with her fingertips, her voice, her lips. Her own dear, most loved Henry.

Instead, she says, "Yes."

He watches her closely for several seconds, as though alert to the possibility of deception. Then all at once, the tension visibly drains from him; the hard line of his shoulders slackens, his hands unclasp, and he stoops beside her. She feels his breath on her cheek, can smell the light scent of his skin, and for a moment she is sure that he is going to take her mouth with his own; but at the last moment he seems to hesitate, almost imperceptibly, too fleeting for her to be certain, and his lips skim past hers, instead moving to imprint the gentle pressure of a kiss on her cheek.

Anne closes her eyes with the sensation of it. Even after all that has passed between them, it still plucks at her as surely as he had applied the skill of his own hand, and as he steps back away from her again, she is very aware of the speeding heat of her pulse pinpointed between her legs. She is only grateful that she has never been one to blush.

"But that is not all," Henry is saying, and she hurriedly drags her attention back to his voice.

He has crossed over to the table, which is still cluttered and vibrant with the fabrics she is yet to choose from for after the baby is born: unbleached linen and deep-dyed wool; silks imported from Venice and lampas enriched with gold and silver, and best of all, an Italian damask that Anne is keeping aside for herself alone, satin-woven and iridescent, deep red brocaded over with the gleaming, pearlescent grey of the warp.

"I have good news," Henry continues briskly, and he does not look at her as he runs his hand across the bolt of Venetian silk that lies closest to him with a gentleness and reverence that draws Anne's gaze.

"Oh?" she enquires with a lightness that belies her, watching the movement of his hand. His back is almost completely turned towards her, but she hears his soft exhale as he smiles.

"Yes." He looks back at her, his fingers drumming a soft tattoo against the silk. His blue eyes have the fierce, leonine light of a merciless victor satisfied by the spoils of his conquest.

"It seems that now all things move in our favour. With the prospective alliance of the Emperor, it is only a matter of time before the world is forced to acknowledge you as England's rightful Queen, and our marriage as valid. Any and all protestations from the see of Rome will be but a howl in the wind."

Anne feels a tremendous leap inside her. It has all been very well to hear rumour of this on the lips of the courtiers, but anything that might have gladdened her has been shot-through with the dark presence of Cromwell's mind at work on the scheme. Upon her soul, she knows that the man is fervent in his desire to undo her, and has been tight with that dog Chapuys in conspiracy for weeks. But to hear this from Henry elevates even the Emperor's victory over the Turks into something wondrous, akin to the miracle she has been longing for. Affirmation. She is at once alive again with possibility…

In a moment, she recalls Cromwell's eyes in the garden that day, the trick of the light that had made them seem green. She cannot stifle the urge to smile that tugs at her mouth as she imagines those eyes darkening in consternation, the engraved line between his brows deepening into a frown of barely-concealed fear, the sensitive curve of his own mouth tightening as displeasure drags at its edges.

_All things move in our favour, and away from you_, Anne thinks, with a venom that even she is surprised to feel.

Again, it is Henry's voice that drags her from her reverie.

"Of course," he says, "we have Mr Cromwell to thank for this."

Her pleasure dissolves, like a reflection shattered from the surface of a puddle. She is unable to disguise her distaste, nor the sarcasm that laces her tone as she speaks: "Of course. Whatever would we do without Mr Cromwell?"

Henry turns to look at her, his expression almost curious. Then suddenly, he laughs, a bright, expansive sound, and takes a step towards where she is still sitting by the fire.

"Sweetheart, I know that you and Mr Cromwell have not been seeing entirely eye to eye of late. In fact - " he pauses by her shoulder, and puts out his hand almost thoughtfully, brushing the back of his fingers against the exposed curve of her neck - "I know that you have quarrelled."

She jerks jealously away from the touch she had been savouring, her eyes furious as she looks up at him. "Has he been speaking to you? About _me_?" she demands.

"Only once I had enquired of him. And indeed, only to say how he knew he had displeased you, and how his regret of it has grieved him sorely."

Anne shakes her head in sharp dismissal, her mouth hard. "I am sure he is sorely grieved for lack of candour."

She feels him go still beside her, the hand that had been returning to its possessive glide across her shoulder stopping on her upper arm, fingers tensing there just lightly, a small threat against her skin

"What do you mean?" he says, at last.

With a sudden movement that seems to startle even Henry, Anne is on her feet, her one hand cradling the encumbrance of her belly that threatens to pull her off balance. Her eyes are fierce and blue and impassioned in her white face.

"My love, you know that I would _never _speak against Mr Cromwell had I not _real _concerns." She throws the words out recklessly, heedless of their cost. She takes a sharp breath, plunging on. "It is true that many regard him most highly for his intellect and diligence, and yet…" She deliberately allows the words to die on her lips, her gaze intent on his face.

The King is implacable as he looks back at her, his mouth a steady line, but she sees a flicker of something behind the coolness of his eyes that she cannot quite define. Doubt? Mistrust?

Anger?

"And yet, what?" Henry says, very softly.

Anne blinks slowly, playing her part to its hilt. She has done this once before, and she can do it again.

Take the knife. Turn it.

"It is my fear that Mr Cromwell does not always act with the best interests of the Crown at heart. With _your _best interests at heart."

His expression barely alters. A flare in the depths of his inky pupils, a small, strange smile that ghosts across his lips.

"And do you know what it is that is in Mr Cromwell's heart?" he says.

Anne lifts her head, pretending that she does not feel the quickening of her pulse. She holds his stare like the challenge it is, feeling him search her like a flame licking a page-leaf.

Abruptly, his smile returns.

"You must never fear to tell me such things, sweetheart." As he speaks, his hand moves up to her face, his thumb tracing the outline of her lower lip. "Especially as, perhaps, we are not at such discord on this matter."

Impulsively, she takes his hand in both of her own, pressing it to her cheek. "I would not speak of such things unless I believed them to be true."

"I know. I know." With the whisper he draws her closer to him, his lips brushing across her forehead, the tip of her nose, until finally his mouth finds hers, and the kiss is deep, the taste and feel and memory of him singing along her spine as she kisses back, twining her fingers around behind his neck, feeling the familiarity of his hardness against her, wanting her as he has not wanted her for months. She intensifies the kiss, her tongue seeking his, nipping at his lip with her teeth...

With the same feline grace with which he had moved to claim her, Henry pulls away, ignoring her inarticulate sound of protest.

"Not now, sweetheart," he says, softly, placatingly, and she feels a thwarted, entirely useless frustration as he places his hand on her swollen stomach. "But soon."

"_Soon_," Anne says, trying to ignore her distracting heat, her ferocious longing, her private wetness. "When our son is strong and thriving in his cradle."

He crushes his lips to her hair, and she is sure that he breathes in, as though savouring the scent of her. Then roughly he parts from her, dipping in a small bow of hurried courtesy, and is gone like a thief from the room, leaving her nothing but the taste of him in her mouth.

Slowly, Anne smoothes her damp palms across the folds of her gown, turning back to the fire. She picks up her black-work and sits down. Her face is edge-lit by the flame, smiling and smiling as she threads the needle under and out.

Perhaps she will wear red and grey damask on the day of Cromwell's death.

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**Next time: '****Cranmer's worried eyes don't leave his face. "He wanted to know if the consequence of such a revelation might be the nullification of his present marriage."'**


	9. Malady

**AN: Thanks as ever for the feedback, guys, with special thanks to new reviewer, Pandora of Ithilien! **

**I'm playing with the idea in this chapter that, at least at this point, Henry was perhaps looking at other ways to possibly get rid of Anne without actually having her murdered, and as the issue of his relationship with Mary Boleyn has its place in history concerning the subsequent invalidation of his marriage to Anne, I decided to use a bit of artistic license with it (not in an _Other Boleyn Girl_ way, mind you :D). Hope you enjoy.**

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9.

He has been unable to get warm ever since that blasted walk.

His appointment with tracking down the infamous Mr Abelard has fallen by the wayside, as do so many other sundry engagements and activities that are not carried out entirely for the benefit or service of the Crown. Cromwell has lost count of the number of (largely misbegotten) dinner arrangements he has had to forsake over the years, or the nights he has spent testing the limits of his eyesight by candlelight when some diplomatic crisis has erupted and dragged him from his bed like a criminal. A trip to the more nefarious districts of London is necessarily of small concern compared to the other demands on his time and person.

Tomorrow, he promises himself wearily, pushing the door to his private study shut behind him while simultaneously loosening the stiff buttons of his collar with his free hand. The Shoreditch house is in something of a disarray at the moment, with half the rooms opened up for airing, beds stripped and linen ferociously laundered, travelling cases sent on ahead stacked in the main hall like beleaguered coach passengers. The place has been entirely given over to a tumult and general chaos of rhythm that Cromwell would never usually have tolerated, but which in this case fills him with an almost inexplicable sense of yearning, anticipatory pleasure when he thinks about the reason.

Gregory is coming home from university.

He has not seen the boy for nearly nine months, not even for the advent of his seventeenth birthday last October. His letters home have been less diligent than Cromwell might have expected from a more studious child, but Gregory seems to have inherited none of his father's linguistic acumen and has always resented the idiosyncrasies of the Latin tongue. His conjunctions in his last letter home had been shocking, but Cromwell knows his son is already long-suffering at the hands of his masters at Cambridge and so allowed the mangled grammar to go unmentioned. They say Latin has had its day, after all.

The important thing is, he is well and, by all accounts, thriving. Cromwell has to consciously stop himself from fretting over his son's health (which has always been more than usually robust), painfully watchful for signs of illness or distemper. Two daughters and a wife are in themselves too striking a loss to bear; any remaining lives inevitably become violently precious. As it is, his heart nearly broke with fear two months ago when Gregory complained of what he cryptically described as 'a slight ague'. He was instantly beset by nightmarish memories of delirium and night sweats, of eyes hot with fever and lips parched to paper, and all the more agonising for his physical distance from his son. He _ached _to be with him. After nearly a fortnight of silence from Gregory following this report, Cromwell was all but ready to drop everything and bolt to Cambridge, but just when his nerves were at shattering point a cheerily dismissive note reached him from the university, any mention of ill health entirely absent from its pages. Clearly Gregory had been rather less aware of his ability to terrify his father merely by putting ink to paper.

He wonders idly if Gregory will have grown at all since he last saw him, shrugging off the weight of his official robes as he moves across the room to where the fire has been newly stoked and throwing them unceremoniously across the back of a chair. The boy had been a late bloomer until he was fifteen when he suddenly achieved three inches in a year, although the last time Cromwell saw him he had still been a good half a head taller than his son. It is perhaps one of the unforeseen pleasures of protracted absences from him, to be able to see anew in him little details and changes that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Every visit, despite his varying academic successes, the boy has visibly flourished in confidence and poise, a _savoir-faire _that is, admittedly, cast aside in order to run into his father's arms.

He eases himself down into the armchair by the fire, toeing off his shoes and stretching his legs out in front of him. At this proximity, the heat from the flames feels blissful, and he rubs at his legs with both hands in an attempt at nursing warmth back into them. It seems useless, because the cold is centred somewhere deep inside him and he keeps feeling the irresistible fingers of a shiver playing up his spine. His senses are being tickled by a sleepy, half-formed fantasy of a cup of Mistress Cawley's hot apple and cinnamon broth, something deliciously warming and fragrant that will clear the cloudiness he is feeling in his head and warm him from limb to limb, but the effort of getting up seems, at least at the moment, too great a sacrifice to make.

He is brought back to himself by the sudden, drowsy lolling of his head forward, and he sits up straighter with a small, startled sound, lifting his hand to rub first one eye, then the other with his knuckles. He had been wanting to get some work done before supper and bed, several bills that need refining and double-checking before Parliament is recalled, but the temptation to snuff out the candles and fall into bed is extremely strong. Maybe he could rise an hour or two earlier than usual in the morning, get some of the bills finished before the day begins in earnest.

His mind already half-made up, he reaches inside the breast pocket of his jerkin and takes out his small, leather-bound appointments diary. The frosted black of a January morning is never enticing, but he has a meeting with Sir Richard Rich at seven to discuss the dispensation of a newly attainted estate in Sussex, and then a summoning of the Privy Council at nine. If he wants to get anything done towards the bills, he will have to make the best of the silent hours before dawn.

He pauses halfway through the act of thumbing through the diary, his hand still flexed to turn a page, looking up in some surprise as he feels a prickling at the back of his nose. He straightens a little as the sensation overtakes him, unexpectedly potent, turns his head with his hand lifting as a receptacle, and releases a single, precise sneeze. He hesitates, hand still curled to his face, before he takes another breath and sneezes again.

Well. _That _was never a good sign.

He is fumbling in his pocket for his handkerchief when there is a soft knock on the study door, followed by the materialisation of a discreet manservant.

"My lord." A bow. "Archbishop Cranmer is here."

Cromwell sighs, feeling all his hopes of an early night expiring in a blink. He presses the cloth of his handkerchief against his nose and nods in weary acquiescence. "Send him through, Russell."

The man bobs again and disappears. Cromwell gives his nose a swift, efficient blow, and has just finished quickly putting his shoes back on when the manservant returns, with entirely unnecessary ceremony:

"His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury."

There is a small, uncertain altercation at the door as the manservant tries to retire unobtrusively but is intercepted by Thomas Cranmer almost walking into his back, who in turn makes an awkward attempt at navigating both the door and the man. They take a couple of clumsy steps around each other, Cranmer apologising skittishly, before the man manages to free himself and darts for the door.

Cromwell, who has watched this performance in amusement, waits until the door is shut before he moves towards Cranmer to clasp the other man's hands in greeting.

"Thomas," he says, warmly, "I fear you have caught us at a time when we are quite overrun with clutter!"

Cranmer gratefully returns the welcoming squeeze of Cromwell's hands. As ever, he is attired soberly, the heavy, dense fur of his cloak all but concealing the heather-purple of his cassock, and when he steps back away from Cromwell his hand makes a habitual, nervous assignation to the cross that hangs around his neck. He carries with him the smell of cold air and wood smoke and damp leaves, and his cheeks are lightly flushed with the wind-snap.

"My dear friend, I am truly sorry to impose upon you without notice - and at such a dreadful hour." His voice is even more timidly fluting than usual, and his brown eyes search Cromwell's face imploringly as he speaks, as though he is worried that by the very instance of his arrival he has caused some terrible offence.

"Nonsense," Cromwell says briskly, gesturing that Cranmer should precede him over to the fireplace. "It is always a great pleasure to see you. We neither of us seem to have adequate time these days." And, despite his earlier reservations, he means it. His few friendships that have managed to endure through his rise to power are ones that he holds as particularly precious, and the more isolated he finds himself growing at court with regards to personal acquaintances (that is, as opposed to necessarily cultivated political allies), the more he finds himself longing for a bygone warmth and companionship that he suspects is largely imaginary, but which seems somehow bittersweet when he considers that last Christmas was spent alone in his office, with several dozen dissolution proposals, three reports of treason in the provinces and chronic back-ache for company. Cranmer is among the few who he would never turn from his door, no matter the hour

Now, he indicates that the archbishop should sit down. "Can I offer you anything? A little ale, perhaps?"

"Actually - " Cranmer nervously smoothes the folds of his cloak as he turns to look behind him at the chair, before settling himself on the edge of its seat - "Some wine would be most agreeable, if it is not too much trouble?"

"Not at all." Cromwell moves to the mantel to ring the small bell there, before sitting down himself.

Cranmer smiles at him thinly, lacing his slender, supple fingers together where they are clasped in his lap. He seems about speak, but then apparently thinks better of it, wetting his lips, before glancing around as the door opens and a serving maid enters the room.

"Some wine for His Grace," Cromwell tells her. "And, er…some of Mistress Cawley's apple concoction, if there is any left," he adds quickly, with a small smile. The girl curtsies and departs.

Once the door has closed behind her, Cromwell looks back at Cranmer. The firelight is playing across the angular planes of the other man's face, and he is rhythmically arranging and rearranging the cuffs of his cassock, seemingly preoccupied by some internal debate.

"I wonder if you came to see me at all," Cromwell says. He means it as a joke, but Cranmer looks up quickly, his expression strained.

"You must forgive me, Thomas," he says. He takes a breath as though mustering his resources before venturing on, an undercurrent of tension in his voice. "I am here because I have a favour that I must ask of you, though it pains me deeply to presume of your kindness in such a manner."

Cromwell frowns slightly, leaning back in his chair. "You know you can always rely on me to be of service to you, in whatever capacity I can."

Cranmer holds his gaze uneasily for a moment, but once again whatever nerve he is summoning is broken by the door being opened and the maid coming back in, bearing a tray laden with two jugs and two goblets in front of her. There is a studied silence while she serves the two men, pouring Cranmer's wine and Cromwell's requested hot, spiced brew, the very smell of which makes his nose tickle. Impatient though he is, Cromwell offers her a soft smile when she finally bobs in acknowledgment and heads for the door.

Cranmer is taking jittery sips from his goblet, and Cromwell drinks slowly from his own, a mixture that is more or less half-soup, half-cider, pungently fragranced and utterly delicious. He savours it, feeling the liquid's warm passage down his throat as he swallows, before he leans forward and puts his goblet down on the small table, fixing Cranmer with a teasingly austere gaze.

"Tell me," he says, firmly.

Cranmer fingers the stem of his own goblet, his eyes anxious as he looks back at Cromwell. A variety of different emotions appear to be struggling for supremacy in his face, and his lashes flicker hesitantly as he blinks.

"Thomas, I have no desire to be the cause or originator of any trouble…" he begins, haltingly.

"_Your Grace_…" Cromwell says sternly, his voice low. Cutting to the point has never really been in Cranmer's nature, but this degree of prevarication is trying his patience.

Cranmer's lips tremor, an almost anguished discomfort in his eyes. Again, his hand travels to the crucifix on his breast, running across it as though finding reassurance in its cold, hard shape.

"I am so very ignorant of such matters," he blurts suddenly, almost stuttering the words. "I do not even know if to speak would be treason."

"Perhaps you should let me decide that," Cromwell says dryly, reaching for his goblet again.

Cranmer stares at him in naked distress for several seconds, then suddenly, all in a rush: "The King has approached me on a very delicate matter, one which I am most disinclined to meddle in. It is entirely beyond my jurisdiction, beyond the ease of my conscience, beyond any semblance of decency or integrity - !" Cranmer's voice has risen steadily as he speaks, tightening shrilly, and abruptly he breaks off, breathing hard, lifting his hand to run his fingers across his lips.

Cromwell stares at him, goblet poised halfway to his mouth. "My friend, are you quite all right?" he says. "Surely anything His Majesty asks of you cannot be so entirely abhorrent to your sensibilities?"

"Oh, but you don't _see_, Thomas," Cranmer says, leaning forward beseechingly. "The very nature of the request troubles me deeply."

"You have not yet told me of its nature."

Cranmer lets his breath out in a gust. His hand trembles just slightly as he sips at his wine.

Then, with a deliberate effort to modulate his voice, "His Majesty has asked me to investigate as to the severity of the penalty that might be incurred should it become public knowledge that he has had, in the past, certain…relations with the Queen's sister."

"Mistress Stafford?" Cromwell says sharply, as though he does not already know more about that particular aspect of his King's extra-marital history than he entirely cares to.

Cranmer's worried eyes don't leave his face. "He wanted to know if the consequence of such a revelation might be the nullification of his present marriage."

Cromwell feels his mouth harden. Very suddenly, the sight of Cranmer's tormented expression irritates him, and he stands up so that he does not have to look at him anymore, turning away and going across the room to where one of the tapers is burning low, just for the sake of something to do. The gulf between them is suddenly immense, darkened by an unspoken foreboding that neither is entirely willing to put into words.

"On what grounds?" Cromwell says at last, watching the slow list of the candle flame as it begins to finally extinguish itself in the wax-pool of its own melting.

"He…" Cranmer's voice is uncertain. "He expressed some concerns about the issue of…consanguinity."

Cromwell's breath expels sharply in a harsh, mirthless chuckle. "You should not trouble yourself needlessly, Thomas," he says. "His Majesty is anxious to address all aspects that could pose an obstruction to the successful validation of his marriage to the Queen. He is simply being cautious." He throws a sharp look over his shoulder at Cranmer, smiling narrowly. "You know the designs of Rome, after all; they have their spies in every detail, anxious to prove the King an adulterer and the Queen a whore."

Cranmer visibly flinches at the word. He looks down at his lap, the skin of his forehead puckering in anxiety. "He seemed most insistent of the fact."

"Of consanguinity?"

"Yes." Cranmer looks up again, meeting Cromwell's eyes across the room. "He said that he…that he is mindful not to repeat the errors of recent, painful history."

"Indeed," Cromwell says thinly. "As I say, caution is essential."

"But you don't understand, Thomas." Cranmer is abruptly on his feet, crossing the room to where Cromwell stands, his face earnest and pleading. "For the love I bear the Queen, which is second only to His Majesty and your own self, not only do the implications of this matter trouble me most grievously, but I question my own abilities to carry out a task of such sensitivity and importance." Once again, he is grasping Cromwell's hands, almost desperately, looking into his eyes with an expression of genuine pain. "You _must _intercede with the King on my behalf!"

Cromwell feels a flash of temper that he is unable to keep in check, and he pulls away from Cranmer, moving past him towards the window. "You're being ridiculous," he says brusquely. "The King's relationship with Mistress Stafford - which amounted to nothing of any consequence, I am sure - has been known within the court for years. There is no reason at all that its ramifications should be a source of any concern to you, or to anyone else."

"And yet that is the very matter," Cranmer says. His hands move in a helpless gesture. "If the knowledge that His Majesty once kept the Queen's sister as his mistress has so long been by-the-by, then why now is the King himself questioning the issue? Why now, when the Queen is with child and the accession of the Pope seems imminent?" He stops, his breath quickening, his dark eyes intent. "Why now, when everything that the King has so long desired seems to be falling into place?"

Cromwell swallows, his expression thunderous. He looks wordlessly back at Cranmer, almost too frustrated to speak. An acidic retort forms on his tongue, but as though some better self is mindful of how much he would later regret cutting Cranmer down, he is taken off guard by a sudden, sharp tickle in his nose, and he just has time to turn away, sneezing harshly into the crook of his arm.

There is a beat of silence. He can almost feel Cranmer's surprise, but he is inexplicably embarrassed and doesn't look at him as he takes out his handkerchief and applies it to his nose. After several seconds, he hears the rustling of the other man's cloak, and then,

"Bless you."

"Thank you," Cromwell says quietly. He finishes tending to his nose and pockets the handkerchief again, his movements deft and brisk. Cranmer is watching him with concerned eyes, and he feels horribly vulnerable beneath the other man's gaze.

"You are well, aren't you?" Cranmer asks, finally.

"Yes." Cromwell looks at him, and smiles softly. "Yes. I'm tired, but I'm quite well."

Though judging by the increasing scratch he can feel at the back of his throat, how long that will continue to be the case is another question.

"I am sorry," Cranmer says suddenly. "I know that I have spoken out of turn, and now I am sure that I have offended you."

"No." Cromwell shakes his head firmly. "You have every right to voice any concerns you might have, and it is my duty to listen to them, not just as a minister but as your friend." He gives a rueful sigh. "And I am far from infallible in that respect."

Cranmer moves impulsively towards him. "It was never my intent to make you think that. I have nothing but the highest esteem for your wisdom and experience."

Cromwell's smile, when it melts onto his face, is slightly bashful. "I value your esteem," he says. "And I have no wish to dictate how you should feel about such matters, but all I can say is that in this instance, you must trust me."

Cranmer's own smile is somewhat weak. "I do trust you, my friend. Indubitably. But it is just…" He stops, sighs.

Cromwell lifts an eyebrow. "Just?"

Cranmer bites his lip. "Just that, there are times when I think a certain superstition has its place." He actually blushes slightly as he says it, laughing in awkward self-deprecation. "One does not like to tempt fate."

"No," Cromwell concedes, putting out his hand to rest on the other man's arm. "But I am confident that we may rest assured on this matter." He gives Cranmer's arm a small, friendly shake, looking into his eyes with a smile.

"All will be well," he says, and he almost believes the lie himself.

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**A/N: In history, Thomas Cromwell had three children by his wife, Elizabeth Wyckes. It is estimated that his two daughters, Grace and Anne, both died in an epidemic of sweating sickness circa 1527 when they were both young children, around the same time that Elizabeth herself died, leaving Cromwell with just his son, Gregory, upon whom he lavished as an expensive an education as that which was afforded to King Henry's own son, Prince Edward. Although in the show it is stated that Cromwell's wife is still alive around the time of Anne Boleyn's downfall and execution, I've decided to go with history for a change and keep Elizabeth's death in 1527. It would prove too difficult for me to try and include her in this story, and besides, I could never do the same justice to Elizabeth Wyckes as that which TrivialQueen has in her own wonderful stories.**

**Next time: '****The man's eyes flick restlessly from the archway behind Cromwell to the glint of gold at his throat, muffled by the collar of Cromwell's cloak. He runs a mottled tongue across his lips, as though scenting for an escape route. "You know, you're not the first who's been looking for him," he says eventually.'**


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